Patrick van Esch, Coastal Carolina University and Yuanyuan (Gina) Cui, Coastal Carolina University

Imagine attending a funeral where the person who has died speaks directly to you, answering your questions and sharing memories. This happened at the funeral of Marina Smith, a Holocaust educator who died in 2022.

Thanks to an AI technology company called StoryFile, Smith seemed to interact naturally with her family and friends.

The system used prerecorded answers combined with artificial intelligence to create a realistic, interactive experience. This wasn’t just a video; it was something closer to a real conversation, giving people a new way to feel connected to a loved one after they’re gone.

Virtual life after death

Technology has already begun to change how people think about life after death. Several technology companies are helping people manage their digital lives after they’re gone. For example, Apple, Google and Meta offer tools to allow someone you trust to access your online accounts when you die.

Microsoft has patented a system that can take someone’s digital data – such as texts, emails and social media posts – and use it to create a chatbot. This chatbot can respond in ways that sound like the original person.

In South Korea, a group of media companies took this idea even further. A documentary called “Meeting You” showed a mother reunited with her daughter through virtual reality. Using advanced digital imaging and voice technology, the mother was able to see and talk to her dead daughter as if she were really there.

These examples may seem like science fiction, but they’re real tools available today. As AI continues to improve, the possibility of creating digital versions of people after they die feels closer than ever.

Who owns your digital afterlife?

While the idea of a digital afterlife is fascinating, it raises some big questions. For example, who owns your online accounts after you die?

This issue is already being discussed in courts and by governments around the world. In the United States, nearly all states have passed laws allowing people to include digital accounts in their wills.

In Germany, courts ruled that Facebook had to give a deceased person’s family access to their account, saying that digital accounts should be treated as inheritable property, like a bank account or house.

But there are still plenty of challenges. For example, what if a digital clone of you says or does something online that you would never have said or done in real life? Who is responsible for what your AI version does?

When a deepfake of actor Bruce Willis appeared in an ad without his permission, it sparked a debate about how people’s digital likenesses can be controlled, or even exploited, for profit.

Cost is another issue. While some basic tools for managing digital accounts after death are free, more advanced services can be expensive. For example, creating an AI version of yourself might cost thousands of dollars, meaning that only wealthy people could afford to “live on” digitally. This cost barrier raises important questions about whether digital immortality could create new forms of inequality.

Grieving in a digital world

Losing someone is often painful, and in today’s world, many people turn to social media to feel connected to those they’ve lost. Research shows that a significant proportion of people maintain their social media connections with deceased loved ones.

But this new way of grieving comes with challenges. Unlike physical memories such as photos or keepsakes that fade over time, digital memories remain fresh and easily accessible. They can even appear unexpectedly in your social media feeds, bringing back emotions when you least expect them.

Some psychologists worry that staying connected to someone’s digital presence could make it harder for people to move on. This is especially true as AI technology becomes more advanced. Imagine being able to chat with a digital version of a loved one that feels almost real. While this might seem comforting, it could make it even harder for someone to accept their loss and let go.

Cultural and religious views on digital afterlife

Different cultures and religions have their own unique perspectives on digital immortality. For example:

• The Vatican, the center of the Catholic Church, has said that digital legacies should always respect human dignity.

• In Islamic traditions, scholars are discussing how digital remains fit into religious laws.

• In Japan, some Buddhist temples are offering digital graveyards where families can preserve and interact with digital traces of their loved ones.

These examples show how technology is being shaped by different beliefs about life, death and remembrance. They also highlight the challenges of blending new innovations with long-standing cultural and religious traditions.

Planning your digital legacy

When you think about the future, you probably imagine what you want to achieve in life, not what will happen to your online accounts when you’re gone. But experts say it’s important to plan for your digital assets: everything from social media profiles and email accounts to digital photos, online bank accounts and even cryptocurrencies.

Adding digital assets to your will can help you decide how your accounts should be managed after you’re gone. You might want to leave instructions about who can access your accounts, what should be deleted and whether you’d like to create a digital version of yourself.

You can even decide if your digital self should “die” after a certain amount of time. These are questions that more and more people will need to think about in the future.

Here are steps you can take to control your digital afterlife:

• Decide on a digital legacy. Reflect on whether creating a digital self aligns with your personal, cultural or spiritual beliefs. Discuss your preferences with loved ones.

• Inventory and plan for digital assets. Make a list of all digital accounts, content and tools representing your digital self. Decide how these should be managed, preserved or deleted.

• Choose a digital executor. Appoint a trustworthy, tech-savvy person to oversee your digital assets and carry out your wishes. Clearly communicate your intentions with them.

• Ensure that your will covers your digital identity and assets. Specify how they should be handled, including storage, usage and ethical considerations. Include legal and financial aspects in your plan.

• Prepare for ethical and emotional impacts. Consider how your digital legacy might affect loved ones. Plan to avoid misuse, ensure funding for long-term needs, and align your decisions with your values.

Digital pyramids

Thousands of years ago, the Egyptian pharaohs had pyramids built to preserve their legacy. Today, our “digital pyramids” are much more advanced and broadly available. They don’t just preserve memories; they can continue to influence the world, long after we’re gone.

Patrick van Esch, Associate Professor of Marketing, Coastal Carolina University and Yuanyuan (Gina) Cui, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Coastal Carolina University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

George R. Tynan, University of California, San Diego and Farhat Beg, University of California, San Diego

The way scientists think about fusion changed forever in 2022, when what some called the experiment of the century demonstrated for the first time that fusion can be a viable source of clean energy.

The experiment, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showed ignition: a fusion reaction generating more energy out than was put in.

In addition, the past few years have been marked by a multibillion-dollar windfall of private investment in the field, principally in the United States.

But a whole host of engineering challenges must be addressed before fusion can be scaled up to become a safe, affordable source of virtually unlimited clean power. In other words, it’s engineering time.

As engineers who have been working on fundamental science and applied engineering in nuclear fusion for decades, we’ve seen much of the science and physics of fusion reach maturity in the past 10 years.

But to make fusion a feasible source of commercial power, engineers now have to tackle a host of practical challenges. Whether the United States steps up to this opportunity and emerges as the global leader in fusion energy will depend, in part, on how much the nation is willing to invest in solving these practical problems – particularly through public-private partnerships.

Building a fusion reactor

Fusion occurs when two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, collide in extreme conditions. The two atoms literally fuse into one atom by heating up to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius), 10 times hotter than the core of the Sun. To make these reactions happen, fusion energy infrastructure will need to endure these extreme conditions.

There are two approaches to achieving fusion in the lab: inertial confinement fusion, which uses powerful lasers, and magnetic confinement fusion, which uses powerful magnets.

While the “experiment of the century” used inertial confinement fusion, magnetic confinement fusion has yet to demonstrate that it can break even in energy generation.

Several privately funded experiments aim to achieve this feat later this decade, and a large, internationally supported experiment in France, ITER, also hopes to break even by the late 2030s. Both are using magnetic confinement fusion.

Challenges lying ahead

Both approaches to fusion share a range of challenges that won’t be cheap to overcome. For example, researchers need to develop new materials that can withstand extreme temperatures and irradiation conditions.

Fusion reactor materials also become radioactive as they are bombarded with highly energetic particles. Researchers need to design new materials that can decay within a few years to levels of radioactivity that can be disposed of safely and more easily.

Producing enough fuel, and doing it sustainably, is also an important challenge. Deuterium is abundant and can be extracted from ordinary water. But ramping up the production of tritium, which is usually produced from lithium, will prove far more difficult. A single fusion reactor will need hundreds of grams to one kilogram (2.2 lbs.) of tritium a day to operate.

Right now, conventional nuclear reactors produce tritium as a byproduct of fission, but these cannot provide enough to sustain a fleet of fusion reactors.

So, engineers will need to develop the ability to produce tritium within the fusion device itself. This might entail surrounding the fusion reactor with lithium-containing material, which the reaction will convert into tritium.

To scale up inertial fusion, engineers will need to develop lasers capable of repeatedly hitting a fusion fuel target, made of frozen deuterium and tritium, several times per second or so. But no laser is powerful enough to do this at that rate – yet. Engineers will also need to develop control systems and algorithms that direct these lasers with extreme precision on the target.

Additionally, engineers will need to scale up production of targets by orders of magnitude: from a few hundreds handmade every year with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars each to millions costing only a few dollars each.

For magnetic containment, engineers and materials scientists will need to develop more effective methods to heat and control the plasma and more heat- and radiation-resistant materials for reactor walls. The technology used to heat and confine the plasma until the atoms fuse needs to operate reliably for years.

These are some of the big challenges. They are tough but not insurmountable.

Current funding landscape

Investments from private companies globally have increased – these will likely continue to be an important factor driving fusion research forward. Private companies have attracted over US$7 billion in private investment in the past five years.

Several startups are developing different technologies and reactor designs with the aim of adding fusion to the power grid in coming decades. Most are based in the United States, with some in Europe and Asia.

While private sector investments have grown, the U.S. government continues to play a key role in the development of fusion technology up to this point. We expect it to continue to do so in the future.

It was the U.S. Department of Energy that invested about US$3 billion to build the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid 2000s, where the “experiment of the century” took place 12 years later.

In 2023, the Department of Energy announced a four-year, $42 million program to develop fusion hubs for the technology. While this funding is important, it likely will not be enough to solve the most important challenges that remain for the United States to emerge as a global leader in practical fusion energy.

One way to build partnerships between the government and private companies in this space could be to create relationships similar to that between NASA and SpaceX. As one of NASA’s commercial partners, SpaceX receives both government and private funding to develop technology that NASA can use. It was the first private company to send astronauts to space and the International Space Station.

Along with many other researchers, we are cautiously optimistic. New experimental and theoretical results, new tools and private sector investment are all adding to our growing sense that developing practical fusion energy is no longer an if but a when.

George R. Tynan, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego and Farhat Beg, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jack Jiang, The New School

In the first few days after Donald Trump’s election in November 2024, purchases of emergency contraceptives spiked, with two companies reporting sales about 1,000% higher than the preceding week. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood reported a 760% increase in appointments for IUDs the day after his win.

Many Americans are fearful that the incoming administration could further curb reproductive rights, 2½ years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Today, roughly one-third of states ban the procedure almost entirely or after the first 6 weeks of pregnancy – before many women and girls realize that they’re pregnant.

Several nominees for Trump’s second administration oppose abortion rights. But some of his allies have suggested that not having children is itself a moral failing.

In a 2019 speech, for example, Vice President-elect JD Vance said that people “become more attached to their communities, to their families, to their country because they have children.” In 2021, he tweeted that low birth rates “have made many elites sociopaths.” During a Trump rally in 2024, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said her children are a “permanent reminder of what’s important” and “keep me humble.” Kamala Harris – who has two stepchildren, but no biological children – “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” Sanders said.

Beyond politics, many people hold similar views. People from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to Pope Francis have described decreasing birth rates as a sign of self-centered cultures.

Plenty of childless people want children but can’t have them. Other people may not want kids for personal or economic reasons. But advocates for “anti-natalism,” a relatively new social movement, argue giving birth is immoral. The anti-natalists I’ve interviewed push back against the idea that childlessness is selfishness. They believe they are protecting their unborn children, not neglecting them: that childlessness is the ethical choice.

Then and now

In the 1970s, the word “anti-natalism” referred to policies designed to reduce a country’s fertility rate, such as the campaign to sterilize millions of men in India during the state of emergency from 1975-1977. Such policies were designed to address concerns of overpopulation and poverty, spurred in part by growing environmental awareness.

In the following decades, niche environmental movements such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement were influenced by this trend and encouraged people to stop having children for the sake of the planet.

However, anti-natalism first came to denote a moral philosophy in 2006, when two key books were published: “The Art of Guillotining Procreators,” by Belgian activist Théophile de Giraud, and “Better Never to Have Been,” by South African philosopher David Benatar.

Rather than emphasize the damage new humans cause to the planet, this new anti-natalism emphasizes the harm life brings to the unborn. By not having children, these philosophers argue, people help the unborn avoid the inherent painfulness of life. The unborn cannot experience life’s pleasures, either – but as Benatar writes, “those who never exist cannot be deprived.”

Anti-natalism took off among a collection of online communities but reached a broader audience in 2019, when Raphael Samuel, a Mumbai businessman, attempted to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. The stunt sparked public conversation about the ethics of procreation and prompted the formation of the activist group Childfree India.

Various anti-natalist groups have formed across the globe since, including a subreddit with about 230,000 members. Stop Having Kids, founded in the U.S. in March 2021, has hosted demonstrations spanning Canada, Bangladesh and Poland. That same year, Asagi Hozumi and Yuichi Furuno created Antinatalism Japan and have been holding frequent outreach events in Tokyo since 2023. In early 2024, an Israeli activist named Nimrod Harel planned a European tour to promote anti-natalism in more than 30 cities.

Stake in the future

Criticism of anti-natalists comes in many different flavors. Most frequently, however, anti-natalists complain that they are called selfish: that critics assume they are prioritizing their own freedom over raising the next generation. “I never understood people who say ‘not having children is selfish,’” one anti-natalist wrote in their community group chat. “Name me one reason you are (having children) for the child’s sake.”

Deciding not to have children can be motivated by a desire for freedom and self-actualization, but it doesn’t have to be. Often, among the anti-natalist online communities I study, the point of not having children is precisely to protect them.

Shyama, an anti-natalist from Bengaluru, India, used to teach low-income children. After witnessing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on her students, she hopes to pivot toward a career in mental health research for children and adolescents.

She speaks about her own children, but only in hypothetical terms, having vowed not to have kids. When she reads about bad news, she feels relieved that her children never have to suffer like that. She refuses birth for their sake. When her friends accused her of challenging other people’s right to have a child, she told me that “this was less unfair than bringing another life into this world and imposing an entire lifetime of inevitable suffering on it.”

Some critics respond that having children gives parents a stake in the future. Philosopher Samuel Scheffler, for instance, argues that having children personalizes the future, anchoring parents to a community that extends beyond their own lifetimes.

Anti-natalists, however, refuse to equate children with a stake in the future. Anugraha Kumar, a Marxist anti-natalist, told me that most leaders within the Communist Party of India are childless. Without needing to support a family, they are free to fight for a better future.

Secularizing birth

Throughout history, catastrophic events have provoked reflection about the ethics of reproduction. After the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jewish and Japanese writers documented some survivors’ apprehensions about giving birth. According to anthropologist Jade Sasser, anxieties about climate change, the economy and political turmoil have fueled current questions about whether to have a family.

But I have argued that this narrative downplays deeper shifts in how many modern societies understand birth.

Traditionally, birth was often considered entwined with religion: something predestined, or even shaped by divine intervention. In many of the societies where anti-natalist groups have formed, however, parents have far more control over whether to give birth, when and to whom – and birth is viewed in a more secular way.

Birth is less often viewed as part of divine order but often likened to a lottery: a game of chance where parents roll the die and their children suffer the consequences. Japanese anti-natalists, for example, sometimes compare their birth to “gachapon”: vending machines that spit out a toy at random each time someone inserts money.

Parents choose to “spin the wheel of life,” an anti-natalist from Philadelphia told me, without knowing what kind of life they will create. Without a way to acquire consent from the unborn, he added, “This is not a risk that is ours to take.”

Jack Jiang, PhD Student in Anthropology, The New School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.