What if your grandfather’s urn (you know, the vase on the mantle your mom won’t let the cat near) had WiFi and could send you birthday emails years after Grandad has gone to heaven? That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s “Immortal Computing” initiative.
In fact, that’s pretty much it: before you shuffle off your mortal coil, you record a series of messages, stories, curses, or dirty limericks, and then they’re stored in some sort of digital medium within a traditional memorial of some sort. Then, when grieving family and friends approach your tombstone/urn/trophy wife, a hologram of your-own-self appears and tells them to get the hell off your lawn. No, really, it says things like, “Hi Jake! This is your grandmother. Do you want some rock candy?”
Or you could send hilarious emails to your family, timed on a schedule, each one relaying another clue as to the contents of your will, and then in the end you could tell them all you spent the money on hookers overseas (after all, you wouldn’t be dead of those people would clean their damned toilet seats). What am I going to do with the technology? I looped MP3 of me saying simply, “I told you I was sick.”
Really though, it’s not email or even holograms that will remain after you’re worm food, it’s your MySpace page. Makes you kind of rethink putting that gawdawful “My Humps” video on there, doesn’t it, Sport?
We see this being used for evil, as spammers take advantage of the technology to spam forever and ever after they’ve got beyond the realms of Earthly prosecution.
E-mail from the grave? Microsoft seeks patent on ‘immortal computing’ [Seattle PI]