Institute For The Future

Flipping the Death Switch

A couple days ago, I was listening to a typically brilliant episode of RadioLab when I heard about a fascinating, niche service: The Death Switch. The name is morbid, but surprisingly apt. Users receive periodic emails prompting them to sign in and prove that they're, well, still alive. And if they fail to sign in after a few prompts, it triggers the death switch, sending emails that the user wrote while living to friends, family and colleagues. They market themselves as "information insurance."

 

The site was developed by Neuroscientist David Eagleman who wrote a fascinating article about the concept of deathswitches in Nature a few years ago. In it, he writes:

 

Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during a lifetime.

 

It soon became appreciated that death switches provided a good opportunity to say goodbye electronically. Instead of sending out passwords, people began programming their computers to send e-mails to their friends announcing their own death. “It appears I’m dead now,” the e-mails began. “I’ll take this as an opportunity to tell you things I’ve always wanted to express...”

 

Soon enough, people realized they could program messages to be delivered on dates in the future: “Happy 87th birthday. It’s been 22 years since my death. I hope your life is proceeding the way you want it to.”....

 

In this way, death switches have established themselves as a cosmic joke on mortality. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

 

 

As we've been looking at the future of well-being in health this year, I've been thinking about what it might mean to "die well." The Death Switch strikes me as both as a tool with enormous potential and danger, in this regard. Eagleman's example of sending a birthday greeting from beyond the grave is just one of the wide variety of thoughtful messages a person could pass along to loved ones.

 

But I'm also reminded of another excellent NPR story, this one on This American Life, about a woman in her forties who was dying of cancer in the early 1990s and left a series of letters for her daughter to be delivered on her daughters birthdays. While the daughter described feeling incredibly loved by the letters, they also made her feel distraught for a variety of reasons. For example, the mom had been a Mormon in her life, and while the daughter drifted away from the church, her mother focused on Mormonism in many of her letters. In effect, the daughter received an annual reminder from her dead mother that she was breaking one of her dying mom's last wishes.

 

It's likely, of course, that had the mom lived, she could have adjusted her expectations about her daughter. But dead people lack that ability.

 

In this sense, concepts like the Death Switch suggest, as my colleague Jason Tester likes to say, our ability to think about the future is still in beta. A death switch, is, in a very real way, a path to communicate with a future that we're not part of. How to do that well--to help give solace to loved ones, for example--is a concept that's still very much in beta.