Mark Zuckerberg has an AI twin. Who Is Mark Zuckerberg?

Justin Beals: Hello everyone and welcome to SecureTalk. I'm your host, Justin Beals. Mark Zuckerberg has been building an AI version of himself. Not for after he dies, for right now. The AI Zuckerberg sits in on meetings, represents him to colleagues, and makes decisions on his behalf while the biological Zuckerberg is somewhere else entirely. So here's the question we're sitting with for a moment. Which one is the real Mark Zuckerberg? The one in the meeting making business decisions, improving budgets, shaping the direction of a trillion dollar company, or the one who isn't in the room? If you find that question unsettling, you should, because it's not just about him.

A nonprofit called LifeNaut will sell you a mind file for a few hundred dollars. You interact with their chat bot long enough, and it starts to replicate your speech patterns and the way you think. They also offer DNA storage, and the eventual goal is to merge the two.

A company called Hanson Robotics built a social robot named Bina 48 to demonstrate what this technology looks like when it's embodied. There's footage on YouTube of Bina 48 having a conversation with the human she was modeled on. They have different favorite colors, different favorite movies. They are connected, but they are not the same. And neither, our guest today would argue, are you and the version of yourself from 10 years ago.

Dr. Candy Cann is a professor at Baylor University and a Thanatologist, a scholar of death, dying and grief. Her new book, Augmented, Life and Death as a Cyborg, asks a question that sits underneath all of this technology we're racing to build. Why are we so afraid of death that we keep trying to engineer our way out of it? Now her answer cuts in an unexpected direction.

The continuity of self that we're trying to preserve through these technologies was never as solid as we assumed. Your selves turn over constantly. Cognitively, you are not the person you were a decade ago. The narrative thread we call the self is something we maintain through memory and story. So when LifeNaut promises to preserve you in a mind file, or when Zuckerberg builds an AI replica of himself, the technology isn't reaching towards something stable and real.

It's reaching toward a story we tell to avoid facing the fact that we change. We decay and we end. This matters for our audience because the questions stop being philosophical very quickly. When AI agents are already approving transactions, attending meetings and representing humans across enterprise systems, who is actually accountable for what they decide?

When someone dies,and their digital replica keeps operating, who owns it? Who consents on its behalf? And who profits from it? Candy raises a concern in her book that I think will define the next decade of data governance. Most people have no legal protection over their digital remains, no will, no directive, no data dignity framework. The wealthy will build digital afterlives with full legal scaffolding. Most people will not.

We are about to create new forms of inequality around death itself. The same way wealth has always defined inequality in life. I had a personal entry point into this conversation. My father-in-law had cancer, and by the time we had to make decisions about his care, dementia had taken his ability to participate in them. We sat across from an oncologist who was ethically driven to keep treating in a healthcare system with no countervailing pressure to stop, and the weight of those decisions fell on my wife and me. Candy has a precise term for what has actually happening. She calls it dying extension. We call it life support, but in many cases, the technology is not extending life. It is extending the process of dying, and it is shifting an ethical burden onto families who are rarely equipped to carry it. That experience is on one end of the spectrum.

Zuckerberg AI is on the other. Both are stories about technology meeting mortality. And both are stories about who gets to decide what a self is, what it's worth, and what happens to it.

Dr. Candy Can is a professor at Baylor University with a research focus on death, dying, and grief and the intersections of marginality, diversity, and death technologies. She holds a PhD in comparative religion from Harvard University, a master's in Asian religions from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a BA in Asian studies and English from St. Andrews. Her four previous books, Virtual Afterlives, Dying to Eat, The Rutledge Handbook of Death and Afterlife and Death and Religion, The Basics, along with widely cited work on digital death and COVID-19 grief have established her as a leading voice on how cultures around the world remember, mourn, and memorialize the dead. Now her latest book, Augmented, Life and Death as a Cyborg from MIT Press, is a provocative rethinking of the intersection of death, technology, and disability. Drawing on her own experience with hearing aids since age four, Dr. Ken challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about life-extending technologies, and what it means to age and die in an increasingly medicalized world. The book weaves in cross-cultural perspectives, contrasting Western anxieties about machines with animistic worldviews that see technology as a conduit of care and spiritual possibility. Please join me today in welcoming Candy to Secure Talk.

Justin Beals: Candy, thanks for joining us today on SecureTalk.

Candi Cann: It was great to be here, Justin. Thanks for having me.

Justin Beals: Now it's a treat. Loved reading your book. It is really awesome and thought provoking, right up my alley type of thing that I enjoy. I wanted to start with your own experience in being human. And I know that sounds like a strange way to start. We are both human beings. Was there any early indications that you were having a different experience in that in your own humanity than perhaps friends or family were having?

Candi Cann: Thank you.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll go ahead and be upfront with your listeners. So I have a 90 % hearing loss. It's not the way hearing loss works. It's actually in frequencies, but it's easier to just sum it up that way. And I was born with congenital cataract. So I had difficult time seeing, and I couldn't hear. When I was four, I was diagnosed with a 50 % hearing loss. And then I've subsequently lost 20 % at two additional times in my life. So basically, I have a progressive hearing loss that's fairly severe. And then I got cataract surgery in my 30s or 40s because I was the youngest one in the room. I was like half their age. It was great. I was like, these are my people. But now I can see.

So yeah, so from an early age,  my mom knew that something was wrong because she would ask me if I wanted ice cream, and I would just ignore her. And she actually took me to four different doctors, and the first three were like, " No, she's being willful. She's just not listening”. And this actually is a common experience among people with hearing loss or disabilities in general. It's difficult sometimes to diagnose if you're a high-functioning and you're able to kind of compensate, which apparently I was able to do. And it wasn't until the last one that they finally diagnosed me with a hearing loss after they conducted a series of tests. Yeah.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I remember a childhood friend once telling me that he didn't realize trees had leaves. He didn't know what people were talking about until someone gave him a pair of glasses. It kind of exposed him all of a sudden to a part of reality that he didn't share with everyone else.

Candi Cann: Yeah, and I talk about this in my book, but I remember when I lost an additional 20 %, and it was 70%, I got stronger hearing aids, and I came home, and the refrigerator was making all kinds of noise. And so I was like, " Oh no, our refrigerator is broken”. So I unplugged it. And I told my roommates at the time, I was in grad school. And I told my roommates at the time, I was like, the refrigerator's broken, it's making all this loud humming noise. And they were like, " No, that's the sound of a refrigerator”. But I had no clue, right? Because I hadn't heard that noise. So there are these kind of things you miss out on, and you don't know. It's also overwhelming, right? So you talk about leaves. Like, I didn't know that the leaves on a sidewalk, when they blow, across a sidewalk, they actually make this little crackling sound as they skitter across. So it can be overwhelming to suddenly have all this sensory input that you haven't had before because as you know, I write in my book that for me, silence was really silent. So it was just that was how my world sounded.

And yeah, so it's definitely. an ongoing discovery is very interesting, think. Yeah, so I love your story about your friend with the glasses and being able to see leaves in the trees, because I've had a very similar thing from a hearing perspective.

Justin Beals: I find it intriguing that the way you engage with your environment, kind of your reality defines the human experience that you have internally. It's a little esoteric to describe that the outside and the inside, there's just not a lot of barrier between it. Who we are is what we experience and vice versa. And who you thought of yourself or how you felt about yourself changed as you learned what refrigerators were doing perhaps. Yeah.

Candi Cann: Right? And then, like going to a cafe, and I'll be sitting in a cafe with a friend, and they'll be like, I hate this song. And I'm like, what song? And they're like, the song that's playing in the background. And I'm like, I didn't know there. But it also made me think about the ways in which spaces that we occupy often are attempting to curate a particular experience and to provoke a certain emotion or experience that you associate with that space, right?

So that's also very interesting to me because I didn't have that like I would walk into a cafe playing music and didn't hear the music for me It was just about the food and the company. I was keeping Yeah, so it which I think some people would say well, that's a real loss But I also felt like I wasn't being indoctrinated in these certain spaces, right? I think a lot of people are not aware of the ways in which their sensory environments are influencing them.

Marketing strategists will tell you, know, smells and cars or in shops, and these are very intentional ways of influencing your consumer decisions. And so it's definitely made me much more conscious and aware of how I'm interacting with spaces. Yeah, so, but I kind of see it as my superpower as opposed to a deficit. And I think that's been a really interesting journey for me as well.

Justin Beals: Think some of the recent scientific articles I've read and some of the more popular science that I've read about the animal kingdom talks about this a little bit too, about how we're starting to realize that there's not this distinct concept of consciousness.

Somewhere between the animal kingdom and us, but actually, it's just the way we sense the environment and ourselves. And has a lot to do with the physical embodiment, the capabilities that we have, and what perception with the environment around us we have an ability to even sense. Yeah.

Candi Cann: And even memory, right?, how we experience an event, we're going to all come away with different understandings and memories of it, right? So it is very interesting when you look at it from that perspective.

Justin Beals: So technology from hearing aids to glasses are something that we're all already using. Especially, hearing aid technology has come a long way. I remember, it wasn't too long ago, one of my early projects on the internet was building a website to describe how cochlear implants work, which was really fun. I learned so much about it in the moment. I thought, " What a cool tech”.

You know, a lot of us would say that the pace of technological change has been increasing very rapidly recently. And let me ask the first question first. Do you agree that the pace of technological change or integration with technology for humans is increasing?

Candi Cann: So I thought this was a great question, Justin, and I would say yes and no. So I think it depends on how you view technology, right? For example, tools and tool adoption. A lot of anthropologists point to the human use of tools as one of the earliest adaptations of technology, right? So I think in that sense, we've had technologies around for a long time. I do think the 1994 release of the IBM Personal Communicator, which is kind of the precursor of the mobile phone and the smartphone really release in the mainstream in 2007 has absolutely changed technologies and the way that we're using them and the ways that we're accessing them. So now I think with the internet and with the smartphone, we are seeing a rapid increase in technology use and adaptation.

Justin Beals: Yeah, and it's changing social fabrics, the way we interact as family units.

Candi Cann: Absolutely.

Justin Beals: Yeah, the way we access information. I think about how rapidly young folks that I know, say high school age, adopt new learning, because there's so much information available for them to just bring in, in the moment compared to you and I had to memorized spellings or parts of speech. Yeah.

Candi Cann: Right? I mean, we had to go to the library and use a card catalog. And I mean, when I was in school, I had to actually like, I think I had a word processor and even like taking pictures, right? You had to take them and then drop them off and hope that they came out the way you wanted them. I it's definitely this instantaneous response time has, I think that's been probably one of the more significant changes from a social perspective. It changes our expectations, how we interact in general and almost anything, right? This kind of rapid response. Now, before you would have to go to library and look stuff up and ask a librarian how to find it.

Justin Beals: Yeah, but humanity has been through technological change in the past and had to come to grips with it. One of the parts of your book that you point out is the invention of the printing press, the availability of information. I mean, that had a big shift in how people find truth or not truth, what they believe or don't believe. I can just think of Protestantism.

Candi Cann: Yeah, and you see that in Asia too with woodblock printing. Mean, the introduction of mass production of printed materials in both Asia and Europe really transforms the cultural landscape, but it also transforms religion, right?

I don't think you would have the Protestant Revolution without the Gutenberg press.The same goes in Japan without woodblock printing. You wouldn't have the rapid spread and adoption of Buddhism. So it really has a huge cultural impact in ways that I think people don't appreciate or understand enough. And that's what I'm fascinated by. And this is again with the internet, right? And social media. And even today with, you know, the war or the military strikes. And, you know, we're seeing a really interesting utilization of social media to kind of get buy-in and feedback. I think the, yeah, I think technology has had some real, there's been some really pivotal points throughout history where technology has been absolutely essential to cultural change.

Justin Beals: Yeah, in my own family background, much of my family are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'm not, but without a printing press, Smith couldn't have published and distributed the Book of Mormon. That's right.

Candi Cann: Right, which you find in many hotels across the United States, right? I mean, it's an active part of the proselytization process,

Justin Beals: Yeah. And to your point about the cultural framing, I've been learning a lot about that lately. In your book, you talk a lot about cyber; it's hard to even say the world, the mix of technology and humanity, as well as things like robots. And I think in the West, we've...view robots is very scary. They're going to replace things.I have the Terminator was a movie of mine when I was a kid that I really liked. But that's a...

Candi Cann: Where's Terminator? we on like Terminator seven, eight? I mean, yeah, that narrative is very popular here.

Justin Beals: That's right. In the West. But one of things I loved is that you point out how that's a Western framing. And there are other cultural frames of which to view technology. You want to share some of your other ways to view the cultural framing of technology, especially robotics or things like that. Yeah.

Candi Cann: Yeah, so a lot of these ideas come from my time in Korea. I was an exchange student as a college student, and then I returned as a Fulbright scholar a few years ago. And I loved visiting all the restaurants and cafes and seeing all the robots all around me. I think I write about this in the book, but one of my favorite robot cafe was 100 % robot, no people at all.

And it was a cafe at the bus station in Tejun. And there's a sign on the wall that says, you know, the best thing about robot cafes is you don't have to deal with grumpy salespeople. And I was like, you know, you're right. Now, there are on the other side, conversely, there are studies that show that these kind of micro interactions that we have, such as with your barista at the coffee shop, can actually decrease loneliness and make you feel more connected to your world. So there's both sides of it/

But I absolutely loved it because I was like, yeah, I'm just not in the mood to interact with anyone today. So this is fantastic that I can just grab a coffee from the robot cafe. All that to say, South Korea has the highest robot density in the world with approximately a thousand industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees. The density is actually six times a global average. And it's really, you know, it ranks number one in the world with robot saturation and the robots are everywhere. So they're in the airports, they will, you can change the language on the robot. So again, this is a great motivator for increasing tourism in South Korea, right? With the Hallyu and the Korean wave and BTS and all of this K-pop and movies. People now don't feel intimidated because they can just simply change the language on the robot. So they have roving guide robots in the airport, you can change the language, you can ask them where the bathroom is, and where you are supposed to catch your flight. There's robots in every single museum. There's generally every restaurant or cafe has a kiosk in the front, and you place your orders there. And again, you change the language first. And so it's not great for learning Korean, but it's great for being able to interact with this space and being able to travel without being intimidated. So robots are pretty popular. And I think Justin, you were telling me about a robot at your favorite dumpling restaurant.

Justin Beals: Yes, yeah. So there's a my favorite soup dumpling restaurant has a robot waiter. And I have to be honest, at first I was like, that thing's gonna run over somebody. Which I think is a very Western way of thinking like, what could possibly go wrong here with this? But, but you know, I'm fascinated by it. And also like the little user experience things, of course, where it's like, it got close to the table, but then the waiter had to come over and help it get the rest of the way there. But I think we're starting to become fascinated with them. You have a deep expertise in religion and religious studies, and I love the historical aspect here. I think especially Buddhism doesn't approach, you know, the mechanical world in the way the Western world does. Is that true? Do you see that?

Candi Cann: Yeah, that's true. part of it. So in Japan, for example, you have a long history of Shinto influence. And in China, you have Taoist influence, which then migrates to Korea as well. And in Korea, you have Korean shamanism. So these religious traditions really incorporate nature into their beliefs. But they also have this kind of reverence for nature that nature and different aspects of a mountain, a rock, a stream, all of these are soul possible, they're sentient possible, they have possibilities of spiritual animus. And so this is a very different view than you find here in the United States, right? So, if an inanimate object can have spiritual possibilities, then robots also can have spiritual possibilities.

So I think this is one of the fundamental differences between technological adaptation and innovation between the East and the West, right? So there isn't that deep suspicion of robots. There isn't that deep suspicion of technology. And this is where I think the United States could get left behind because we have this cultural barrier that we're working against here.

For some reason we're fine with medical technologies, right? So I would argue that medical culture is another culture that stands kind of outside of traditional American culture. But, you know, so it's okay for us if we have medical technologies. People have no problem with pacemaker or hearing aids or, you know, a hip implant or, you know, all these different things.

But for some reason, AI gets a terrible rap, robots are scary. So this is where I think we do need to learn to think about and learn about these cultural influences on the way we view technology. Because I think if we don't, we're going to get left behind as a country.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I certainly believe that it have seen in my career technology not used for the good, you know, broadly. Sometimes I believe that the the West's inability to think about technology as something that they can manage or have some ownership over means that we kind of are scared of the exterior, like we have no control over it.

Candi Cann: Right.

Justin Beals: I like this Eastern framing because I believe that, you know, if there's a connection between you and the woodblock, you know, that you created and what it says, then you can have some control over it's good or bad, you know, in the broader cultural environment. Would you agree? Does that resonate for you?

Candi Cann: Yeah, I agree. Technology is viewed as a natural partner to human progress. so, you view technology as an assistant, as a helper. And I think that's a great way to view it. I mean, these technologies, and again, my question would be, why do we make exceptions for medical technology, but hold suspicion for other types of technology?. And again, I think part of it is because we do see it as a culture unto itself, right? It also has like, who's allowed into the hospital room? Who's allowed? What are the times that someone can visit? So I think the reason I give medical culture as an exception is to kind of show we actually do make exceptions. We just don't do it for the broad field of technology. We do it for this very narrow subfield, right? Which I think is a mistake. And I think we need to be more critical of some of the technologies we're using in medical spaces and maybe less critical of the technologies that are aiding us in our everyday work.

Justin Beals: Let's build on that a little bit because you're obviously using medical devices to engage, know, to your reality. What are some of your present day concerns from medical technology? And as you point out in the book, like it makes us cyborgs. The amount of medical technology and humanity are getting mixed together.

Candi Cann: Well, I mean, there's the security aspects which you have kind of alluded to, right? So we've got Joe Biden, for example, he has his pacemaker has to be disconnected because there's some fears surrounding that the pacemaker could get hacked, right? Then there's just the basic power using power. You know, we're seeing some countries are attacking power structures as a way to disable the other countries, right? So if you don't have access to power and you're using an oxygen tank or you're on dialysis, I mean, that could really cripple your access, right? So I think we need to be more intentional about also the quality of life. You might not want to do dialysis regularly.

You might prefer to have a quality of life over the quantity of life. You live longer, but you're going to be hooked up to machines for hours a day. So I think we just need to be more critical about these technologies and how they impact our quality of life. And then, along with that, I work in death and dying. That's just kind of my field. I would think about life support. We call it life support, but it's really death extension, dying extension support, right? I mean, it can be life support and then you can be weaned off of it, but more often than not, it's just extending the dying process and making it more medicalized and more difficult. It's also shifting responsibility of dying onto families, and they're not always equipped either religiously, ethically, et cetera, to make the kind of decisions that have to be made around that technology. I think these are the kinds of things I would like to see people think more intentionally about. Yeah.

Justin Beals: This part of your book really resonated with me. My father-in-law in his process of dying had cancer. And we had a long discussion with the oncologist about some, trying to navigate the right decisions because he also was suffering from dementia. It was fairly the cancer progressed a fair bit before we had to have a discussion.

Candi Cann: Right.

Justin Beals: And it was very hard ethically, we loved him dearly, to decide what is the balance between quality of life, know, surgeries that could be very impactful to that quality of life. And he was not equipped to make those decisions at the time either, because he was mentally incapacitated. And of course, for the oncologist, they have an ethical code that drove them to make certain recommendations that it was very tough for me and my wife, yeah. It was a challenging situation, yeah.

Candi Cann: Yeah, and that's really difficult, right? Because when a doctor has been trained to keep the patient living at all cost, then you're working against that culture, right? But then there's this other aspect that I really think part of the issue is in the United States, we have a private healthcare system. So you don't have government input to make decisions that are going to minimize cost, right? So in a socialized healthcare system, the doctors are sometimes burdened, but often given the requirement to provide care, but not at the expense of others, right? And so part of that is rationing out care so that people receive the best care, but it doesn't overtax the state as a whole, right? So in other words, here in the private healthcare system, a doctor is gonna keep going as long as you let them. And that's not something everyone is equipped to deal with. So this is where patient autonomy really becomes important. And we have tools for this. We have living wills. We have patient advocacy, we have lots of tools that allow patients to make these decisions before they get incapacitated, and unfortunately, hardly anyone takes advantage of these.

Justin Beals: Okay, I'm gonna switch topics for us a little bit, Candy. I was very intrigued about a company you talk about in your book. Could you describe for us the work at LifeNaut?

Candi Cann: Yeah, so LifeNaut is a nonprofit research project that's managed by Terasem. And they essentially explore the possibility of digital immortality through technology. And there are several aspects of it. They basically have what's called mind files, which are interactive chat bots. And so you can go to lifenaut.com and you can establish your own mind, quote unquote, mind file. Basically, you just create an account and you just interact with this chat bot long enough and it will start to replicate your speech patterns the way you think. Yeah, and so that's the mind files. And then they also have these kind of interactive avatars that come out of that. And then alongside that piece is something called a bio file where you can send them your DNA, and they keep that in cold storage. It's actually pretty minimal in terms of cost. They're basically this group is trying to make this technology accessible for the average person. So I think the DNA storage right now is like $400 or something. It's a lifetime account, which is pretty affordable. And then hopefully one day they hope to merge your MIME file with your bio file.

And then one of the kind of ambassadors, if you will, of this company is Bina48. And there's just some amazing footage of this robot. She's a robot. She's a highly advanced social robot. She was made by Hanson Robotics. They have a bunch of other really cool robots. And so Bina48 is supposed to demonstrate how a MIME file operates within an artificial bot.

And so the idea is that this is one version of kind technological immortality, if you will, through robotics.

Justin Beals: I love this story. It pushes back on something that never sat well with me and that's Ray Kurzweil's, I like his synthesizers, but Ray Kurzweil's idea of this singularity, like in this magical moment, we will have sentient robots. I think it's much grayer and this is that gray area in a way, right? Like we're taking from a human data, starting to embed that in a large language model or information in a physical form of a robot, but it's progressing in that modality. Yeah.

Candi Cann: Yeah, and yet at the same time again, I think we are seeing other aspects of this that we're just not paying attention to. So cloning, for example, the replication of the genome. I went to Harvard when they were first mapping the genome, and it took years. Now it's like instant. There's ways in which you can genetically reproduce a mammal. Twins would be one example of a natural clone. But yeah, so it's you, but it's not you, right? They have the same genes, but they're not you, and they're walking around. So I think this is actually more like what it is in reality. Bina, there's a great video on YouTube where Bina, the bio Bina, has a conversation with Bina 48 and they discuss things together and they have different favorite colors and they have different favorite hobbies and different favorite movies. So it, to me, it's, we do see examples of this in the natural world, like with twins. So yeah, I don't think it's as strange as it seems, but I'm not, think what people are really doing when they create this technology, they're trying to find a way to overcome death. And I think that's, you know, I think we really need to look at why we're so afraid of death and why we're so afraid of the difficult parts of life. Because when you give life to something, it will also die.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I love this line of conversation because as I read the book and I thought about it, I started thinking about, well, what is the relationship between Bina and Bina 48, the person, the biological individual and the robot? And there is a connection, of course, but they're not the same. You know, it's not exact. And even twins have different trajectories in life, we know that. And to your point on death and dying, this is gonna sound really esoteric. It's like, we are not the person we were yesterday, nor will we be the same person in the future. But we strive for that continuity of self in our own heads, yeah.

Candi Cann: Right, and even our cellular turnover is constantly, I mean, so literally from a biological level, we are not the same person. this is the other, yeah. So I guess I like to go to the question that I think is under that, and that is, why are we so uncomfortable by death? Why do we keep running away from it? Why do we try and create these solutions? And what does that mean then for our future and for us? Yeah.

Justin Beals: I'm sure that has a cultural framing aspect to it as well. My Protestant upbringing had a very strong perspective on what happens after you die. Perhaps others have not quite the same fear embedded.

Candi Cann: Yeah, and I do think that's part of the issue too, right? With the one and done theology, like you have one life and then that's it and then you're either in heaven and hell. I mean that's, you know, there's no do-over. So there's no reincarnation that you find in Hinduism or Buddhism. There's no, you know, middle ground with purgatory that you find in Catholicism. So, and then there's not a relationship between the living and the dead, except through stories and kind of looking back, right?

So I think that's part of the problem. We don't have these kind of built-in mechanisms in Protestantism and then in Protestant influence culture, right? So even if you're not Protestant, but you've been raised in a Protestant influence culture, I think these are some of the worldviews that you're going to adopt and or struggle with as a result. And yeah, so it's problematic and difficult because if we want people not to grieve because they're supposedly in heaven, then that's difficult because it's a difficult thing to lose someone and to experience their death and to be sad. And so there's not this cultural space, right? I think when you're in a culture that allows for this exchange between the living and the dead, you have a lot more space to kind of think about these things and what they mean to you and to navigate. Death is hard. Death is terrible and hard and difficult. It's, you know, but it is in fact a part of life.

Justin Beals: Yeah, you introduced me to a new word. I think it's germane to the topic, Thanatologist. Can you describe what a Thanatologist is for us?

Candi Cann: Sure. So I am a death scholar. So I, in grad school, I took a course called Death and Dying in Buddhist Cultures. I went to grad school in Hawaii for my masters. And then we met every Saturday at a different Buddhist temple around the islands and learned about death and dying and that culture. And then we ate the food and, so for me it was like this full sensory experience. I was like, I love this. This is what I want to do. So then I went to Harvard and got my doctorate and was fascinated by these kind of narratives that people tell around death and dying. So ever since then, I've been a Thanatologist. And so I basically researched death, dying, and grief and kind of the social structures and cultural influences surrounding death, dying and grief. I'm very interested in that intersection with technology, particularly with social media and the ways that people tell these stories in their social media, and online.

Justin Beals: We, okay, this is going to sound a little bit dark, but I was chatting with my partner recently about Facebook specifically, and we were kind of like, it's my death notification application. Like, people that I have met in life, I'll realize that they have passed away because I'll get that through Facebook. And that was their current perception of the value of that social media platform. I found that absolutely fascinating.

Candi Cann: Right?. Well, and the problem is Facebook, you know, when you say my Facebook account is kind of like MySpace versus Facebook versus Instagram, I mean, you're instantly putting yourself in a certain era, right? And so it is, I mean, we anticipate more dead people on Facebook than living in like 20 years. So, It is one of those platforms in which you have a lot of people that was their first or second. You might have MySpace first, but it was their first or second entry into social media, right? And so that tracks, that absolutely tracks.

Justin Beals: So, one your book starts to look to some of the future state and things that people are developing. Life Naut is a good example of people doing the research. feels like, I'm a little curious about this concept of uploading ourselves to the internet, you know, in this concept of cheating death in a way. Do you think that we're close to or is this one of those peanut butter over time, we spread it out kind of activities to this concept?

Candi Cann: I think certain demographics are closer to it than others. In other words, I think it is more possible for those who are wealthy and have access to these kind of technologies. And, You know, one of the things I do in the book is I provide a couple of appendices, and one of them is your digital remains will because people are not thinking about the legality of their digital remains once they die. And this is something that's also really important from an ethical perspective. You have to be able to provide informed consent. You have to have identity rights over your likeness. You should have control. You can do that by, and I just give it as an example, but this is something that people need to start thinking about now. Because we've seen that happen with several famous people, but I do think as technologies continue to develop and innovations continue to be created, that this is going to be more of a real concern as we move forward. So yeah, I know that's kind of a half-answer to your question, but that's really, yeah.

Justin Beals: No, I think it's really helpful. And I've been tracking along, very recently, I know Mark Zuckerberg has been creating an AI version of his CEO persona, and it's been sitting in on meetings with people. I find that absolutely intriguing, a little risky from a security perspective. What are they allowed to approve? I'm sure they put a budget amount the AI is allowed to approve. But yeah, it could go wildly awry. It probably will in some ways, but also it is available because of the monetary resources, right? To be able to build an LLM based upon your text, especially in knowledge, yeah.

Candi Cann: Well, and then that takes on, you know, the ethical question of honest representation. And I mean, people who don't have access to legal services to create digital remain wills in advance of their death. Like, I think it can create some serious issues and more social inequities, right?

Justin Beals: I know I was curious, how do you think, let's say that this does become more available, we've seen that in computer science, we can bring more computing power over time, we innovate in that space, and as it becomes more available, how do you think we should think about some of these digital future selves? Are they separate than us? Is it a life continuity, or are they replicas? How do you think we'll perceive them?

Candi Cann: Well, and this is where I think it gets tricky and why I talk about disability, because I think disabled people are at the forefront of a lot of these issues, right? Because we're already incorporating these technologies into our bodies, and we're utilizing these technologies first in many ways. So I think the most important thing is thinking about informed consent and about

data dignity and provenance, ensuring that materials are ethically sourced, that they're accurately contextualized, that they're not misused. But I also think there's some really interesting possibilities that I'm excited about, and I think it's going to be an interesting time. think one of the of the technologies I talk about in the book is, One of the technologies I talk about in the book is for AR and BR. In Korea, there was a famous TV show where this mother loses her child to pediatric cancer, and so she dies, and in real life, she's there with her daughter helping her as she dies. But afterwards, they then replicate her daughter and create this. And you can find this on YouTube. I think it's called Missing You is a TV show. And so she gets to interact with her and tell her all the things that she was thinking. She knows that's not her daughter. She's got the VR goggles on.

She can't touch her, but she can see her, but it gives her this closure where she's able to have the conversation she needed to have for her own self to kind of work through some of the emotional issues that she couldn't put on her daughter, right? Her daughter was a child. And so I think this is where this technology can really be helpful. Some people, again, I see a lot of responses here like, I don't like that. That's going to impede the mourning or grieving process. But will it help you find closure that you couldn't find in real life? Because you are a mom and it is your responsibility to be there, not to put your emotional burdens on someone, right? And so I

I love this show, and they interview the whole family after, and the mom is like, this is so what I needed and I was able to have these kinds of conversations. So I think there's a lot of great applications for technology in this space, and I'm excited about it. I'm hopeful about it, but I remain concerned about misapplication, misuse, and then access, right? Financial access.

Justin Beals: Yeah. Candy, thank you so much for your book and spending time with myself and our audience today. It is absolutely intriguing research work and opportunity for me to learn. Well, we hope you have a great day, and all our listeners have a great day. Thanks for joining us today on Secure Talk.

Candi Cann: Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate it.