Eternal Sunshine of the Legal Mind

• Author: Omar Ha-Redeye
• Date: January 25, 2015

Many years ago, when I was still early in my career as a nuclear medicine technologist, I had a co-worker named “Jackie” (not her real name), who I still think of to this day.

“Jackie” was an incredible person. She was a breast cancer survivor. She had a quirky, yet fascinating personality. And she happened to be cross-trained in both nuclear medicine and other modalities. I did everything I could to learn from Jackie, and she was always kind, patient, and understanding – basically all of the qualities we wish we encountered when we were articling, but never would because working in the law is definitely not like the health care sector.

I distinctly recall “Jackie” saying one day that she wished she could put everything she knew on a computer chip, and just plug it in to my brain. It seemed a waste, she said, to accumulate a lifetime of knowledge and not be able to pass it on.

That possibility may still emerge.

Simon Parkin details on the BBC a new web service in development, Eterni.me, which preserves a person’s memory after their death,

Eterni.me collects almost everything that you create during your lifetime, and processes this huge amount of information using complex Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Then it generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends, even after you pass away.

In a far more rudimentary fashion, many of us already do this through social media. My late colleague, Thomas Wisdom, who helped found Law is Cool, is regularly visited by me on his Facebook page, maintained to this day by his family members.

This site uses social media inputs, but requires decades of regular interaction by the user to improve accuracy. It essentially creates a search engine or timeline about you, including materials you never published or made public.

Parkin considers the demise which would occur with the company’s insolvency, or a technological blackout. If we’re striving for immortality, the expiration date should be eternity.

He also contemplates going beyond the selective inputs of people’s personalities that they prefer, and instead utilize brain mapping to encapsulate the entire mind. Although there have been significant developments with the exploration and charting of these new worlds, the process extracting and recording the information still proves largely elusive.

And of course, there’s the perpetual question of ownership of these mind maps...