Every few years, Hany Farid and his wife have the grim but necessary conversation about their end-of-life plans. They hope to have many more decades together--Farid is 58, and his wife is 38--but they want to make sure they have their affairs in order when the time comes. In addition to discussing burial requests and financial decisions, Farid has recently broached an eerier topic: If he dies first, would his wife want to digitally resurrect him as an AI clone? Farid, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, knows better than most that physical death and digital death are two different things. "My wife has my voice, my likeness, and a lot of my writings," he told me. "She could very easily train a large language model to be an interactive version of me."

Tamara Kneese studies how people experience technology. She is a senior researcher at New York-based nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute. Her new book, Death Glitch, examines what happens to our digital belongings when we die, and argues that tech companies need to improve how they deal with death on their platforms for the sake of all our digital posterity. The posthumous fate of our digital belongings seems a morbid topic. Not many people think about their digital legacy, but our digital belongings are accumulating.

As 2018 rolls to a close, it's time to turn our attention to 2019 and the possibility that it holds. What will happen next year is anybody's guess, which is half the fun in assembling (and hopefully reading) predictions from leaders and experts in the big data and data science fields. Machine learning had a good year in 2018. But enterprises will embrace machine learning in new and profound ways in 2019, envisions Hilary Mason, GM of machine learning at Cloudera. "Next year we'll see a new step in maturity in the enterprise ML transformation as companies advance from proof-of-concepts to production capabilities," Mason says.

Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he's dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it. Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual "consultant" when the actual CEO is gone. Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company's execs. "I'm not a fan of that company's leadership," the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval.

A Swedish funeral agency is looking for volunteers for an ambitious Black Mirror-esque artificial intelligence project that will give the deceased digital immortality and pave the way for communication with the dead.

The theory that humans will eventually be able to upload our brains to computers has fascinated futurists and neuroscientists for years. By transferring our minds into machines we could live forever, unmoored from the feebleness of our physical bodies. The concepts of death and bereavement as we know them now would cease to exist. Currently the idea lives within whitepapers and sci-fi movies, and the only thing (most) researchers agree on is that it won't be possible for a really long time. But while we're far from achieving that pinnacle of immorality, technology in the here-and-now has already started giving us a sliver of eternal life while shaping how we grieve our loved ones if and when they die.

Christoffer O. Hernæs is vice president of Strategy, Innovation and Analysis at Sparebank 1 Group, Norway's second-largest financial institution. When I was growing up, my father often told me that Andy Warhol once said that he wanted to be a machine, and that it would be a lot easier to be a machine -- if something broke, you could just replace it. Even though small wounds and injuries heal, this has not been the case for humans. If something were inherently broken, it would stay broken the rest of our lives. Which relates to another common saying: The only two things in this world that are certain are death and taxes.

In the early 1990s, a Hungarian girl who attended Alexey Turchin's school suddenly died. Turchin, a Muscovite teenager who had a crush on the girl, resolved to bring her back to life. To do this, he decided to interview the girl's classmates and friends in order to collect every bit of information about her. This data, fed into a supercomputer (to be designed, built, and operated by Turchin himself) would then be used to conjure up a digital reproduction of the late girl's self. The plan didn't pan out, partly because there wasn't a supercomputer able to emulate the human brain, and partly because--as Turchin puts it--"that was before social networks and there wasn't much information around about her."

Would you want to live forever? Would you want to be able to ask for their advice long after they're gone? As CBS2's Maurice DuBois reported, cloning a loved one is no longer the stuff of science fiction thanks to "digital immortality." Like many women, Bina Rothblatt doesn't like to talk about her age, but she does like to talk about the past. "I used to play piano, and my parents pushed me into a recital," she said.

By learning everything there is to know about you and your online habits, social network ETER9 promises a kind of digital immortality wherein an artificially intelligent agent continues to post on your behalf long after you're dead. The future is creepier than we ever imagined. ETER9, a startup launched by Portuguese developer Henrique Jorge, is still in the beta phase, but 5,000 people have already signed up for the service. It currently features a Facebook-like newsfeed, and a "cortex" that works much like a Facebook wall. But that's where the similarities end.