Once you create your first digital replicant, there’s no fundamental reason why you can’t create more.
We can consider three different types of replicants:
- You Unfiltered. Your digital replicant exactly as you exist today.
- Replicants from a certain age. Your digital replicant filtered to emphasize data and experiences from certain pivotal periods of your life
- Model replicants. Your digital replicant blended with people you admire or ideals you hold dear
Each of the three types of replicants naturally lend themselves to different use cases. You might also consider combining them to form a ‘Council of You’ akin to assembling a team of trusted advisors drawn from the spectrum of your own experiences and ideals.
You Unfiltered
You Unfiltered is the digital replicant that is as close as possible to the real you as you exist today. It’s a virtual representation of you that can engage in conversations, share memories, develop new insights based on your pattern of thinking, and perform various tasks in the digital realm.
You can use You Unfiltered to engage in Mechanical Turk tasks for which your biological self doesn’t have the time. A simple version of what this might look like is Seth Bot, an AI trained on marketing guru Seth Godin’s writings.
With millions of readers and fans across the globe, there’s simply no way that Seth can respond to all his audience’s requests for advice. Those fans can, however, ask the advice of Seth bot, which responds with natural language recommendations “according to Seth Godin” with links to his relevant work.
Another use case for You Unfiltered is to act as your mirror to the world. Sometimes it’s hard to see what others see in ourselves. By engaging with You Unfiltered, you can see your digital footprint through a clear, unbiased lens. You might find that the you that you think or want to show to the world isn’t really there, encouraging you to course correct.
Replicants from a Certain Age
Is there is a certain age or time period in your life that was particularly impactful or from which you’d like to draw upon or re-visit? Maybe it’s your curiosity as a child, the enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge in your college years, or the relentless ambition with which you started your career.
While Biological You might think you remember how and what you thought at these ages, calling upon those thoughts and feelings by memory alone is often insufficient. Human memory is fallible and often incomplete. A better approach is to proactively create digital replicants of yourself at these critical junctures.
For example, let’s say you want to re-live the memories of your college years. After creating your digital replicant from this age, you might go on a virtual campus tour, exploring and re-living your college experience as it was then, visiting your favorite spots, and rediscovering the thrill of learning and new ideas.
Maybe you’re interested in tracking your personal growth and career development. You could call upon the digital replicant of your younger self to analyze and provide recommendations on a current challenge you are facing and compare them to your own.
Model Replicants
As humans, we’re flawed. While one might argue that those flaws are inherently beautiful and part of what makes us human, on the margin most us fantasize about chipping away at those flaws. You can do just this with your model replicant by training the model to be a blend of you and who you want to become.
Maybe you are a devoted religious follower and your religion has certain requirements or teachings that you want to follow. You feed those teachings into your model, and the question “What would Jesus do?” becomes less open-ended and much more instructive.
Maybe there is a particular person you admire. You can train your replicant on that person’s writings, speeches, or other artifacts to bring some of that person’s essence into your replicant. Your replicant is still you, but with a little boost from Plato, Confucius, Gandhi, or any of the other greats.
Creating A ‘Council of You’
Your digital replicants will carry your legacy after your biological death, but you might also seek their support during your life.
Imagine a ‘Council of You’ comprised of a selection of your favorite age-based and model replicants to which you can turn to for advice on your current challenges. With this advisory council, you can position yourself to make better decisions.
As entrepreneurs, we know firsthand that one of the most challenging elements to building a successful business can be the feeling of building it alone. How many more would-be entrepreneurs would see their vision through if their judgment and nerves were steeled by their own Council of You?
Summary
Your digital replicants will play a vital role in creating a legacy that can persist, converse, and contribute long after you’re gone. But death is not where their usefulness begins.
Well deployed digital replicants are immediately useful even as your biological self continues to thrive. The next time you face a great challenge, consider which of your digital replicants you might bring to help you overcome it.
- Luke
