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Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Keep in mind that your descendents probably won't care about a huge majority of what you leave them. Photos annotated with a date, time, people in them, and an explanation, maybe, but generally my generation hasn't given a shit about the tonnes of books, music, photos, furniture, knick knacks, and antiquities bequeathed to us. It would be bizarre if our kids didn't maintain that tradition.
Bear in mind, though, that the technology for dealing with these things are rapidly advancing.
I have an enormous amount of digital archives I've collected both from myself and from my now-deceased father. For years I just kept them stashed away. But about a year ago I downloaded the Whisper speech-to-text model from OpenAI and transcribed everything with audio into text form. I now have a Qwen3 LLM in the process of churning through all of those transcripts writing summaries of their contents and tagging them based on subject matter. I expect pretty soon I'll have something with good enough image recognition that I can turn loose on the piles of photographs to get those sorted out by subject matter too. Eventually I'll be able to tell my computer "give me a brief biography of Uncle Pete" and get something pretty good out of all that.
Yeah, boo AI, hallucinations, and so forth. This project has given me first-hand experience with what they're currently capable of and it's quite a lot. I'd be able to do a ton more if I wasn't restricting myself to what can run on my local GPU. Give it a few more years.
I agree. I keep loads of shot that I'm hoping one day will just be processed by an AI to pick out the stuff people might want to actually see.
"People" includes me. I don't delete anything (when it comes to photos, videos, etc) and just assume at some point technology will make it easy to find whatever.