Thoughts on a Post Mortem Autonomous Command Center
What I want – and I may be it’s only use case – is a control center, a hub if you will, that will manage, quarantine and harden all electronic interfaces upon the user’s death. Hrm. That came out all wrong. Let me come in again.
Today, I come out here several times a week and I pundit, spin, and write whatever I want. I write things that get published out into the ether, and others that are only for my own musings. Sometimes I write things that I get around to finalizing a full year later. (Currently I have 72 drafts pending – to give you just a feel for what I am talking about.) It could be I’m waiting on someone to get back to me. Maybe I started a thought and just didn’t get around to finishing it. Like this post? It’s been sitting in my drafts bucket for 3 months, and rattling around in my head for even longer.
My site is a live and organic thing today. But what should it be after I die? Just because I’m gone doesn’t mean it needs to stop. But it definitely ought to change… right? Maybe even that is too abstract for some of you. Let’s play out the simplest of possibilities.
Jan 1, 2016 – Taylor Holmes Dies in a tragic car accident.
Jan 3, 2016 – my blog autonomously posts my own goodbye to you all.
Magic? No, it would be simple enough. A plug in could be written that requires the author of the blog to touch the site or hit a button remotely once a week say… or every 24 hours. What have you. And if they don’t, the blog assumes the author has passed on to the great yonder beyond and then begins to act accordingly. The simplest of ideas would be a post saying goodbye. But if you set up that initial control mechanism the sky’s the limit. And if you take the idea of a digital footprint beyond that of a blog, and out to the larger electronic terra firma things could get really crazy really really fast. Let’s play out another scenario:
Jan 1, 2016 – Taylor Holmes Dies at the hands of a Circus Lion.
Jan 3, 2016 – the Autonomous Command Center (ACC) sends an email to his wife, and children sending his goodbyes from beyond the grave.
Jan 5, 2016 – the ACC notifies his followers on his blog, facebook, twitter and all social feeds that he has passed away and sends his goodbyes.
Jan 7, 2016 – Unfinished blog drafts are deleted, published, or archived
Jan 7, 2016 – Commands sent to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to delete accounts
Jan 30, 2016 – Notifications sent to family that Gmail, LinkedIn and Box accounts will be deleted
Feb 7, 2016 – All online accounts deleted after key data is archived
Feb 14, 2016 – A Valentine Birthday email is sent to my wife
March 1, 2016 – All the content on my blog is packaged up and shipped to an on demand book publisher, which is then mailed to my wife and friends upon printing.
March 15, 2016 – Cyber police and the NSA begin search for the kernel that is still acting on my behalf – with the intent of killing it.
July 1, 2016 – the skies the limit.
The real magic of this sort of a solution would be to create a WYSIWYG drag and drop sort of command console.
Which I snagged from JAYSE.TV – which is from a great chap that helped design the computer interfacs on behalf of the movie Ender’s game. Want to add Facebook as a control point? Login – give the ACC admin rights – and give it a killswitch timer. Or better yet, tell it to message your best friend a week from now and tell them the things you wished you’d always said. Not weird enough? Patch the ACC into your home wi-fi network and tell your XBOX One to turn on your favorite movie on important days, anniversaries or holidays. Want it to just strip mine everything and leave nothing behind? Fine. Give it rights to all your cloud solutions. Want it to send your favorite photos out to Walmart photo printing to be delivered to your children – easy. With apis, and with the right login credentials… the ACC can timeswitch anything you want it to…
Actually – I see a really interesting book about a guy like me, taking this idea too far… forming in my head even now…
