Governing Digital Remains with Dr. Carl Öhman

This episode of the AI Governance Podcast features Dr. Carl Öhman. Carl is an Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University and the author of the 2024 book, The Afterlife of Data. He is one of the world's leading experts on the "digital afterlife industry" and the ethics of our informational remains.

Carl joined Enzai's Matt McCallum to discuss:

The "Informational Body": Why we need to treat our digital footprint as a persistent extension of ourselves that outlasts our physical lives.

The Regulatory Gap: Why rights under frameworks like the GDPR "cease" at the moment of death, and the governance vacuum this creates for digital remains.

Narrative Capture: The dangerous situation where a single individual or tech giant can own the entire historical narrative of movements like #MeToo through the purchase of platform data.

Digital Colonialism: The economic incentives that could lead to the preservation of Western history while the digital records of the Global South are erased to save server space.

Gods of Data: A preview of Carl's upcoming work on how LLMs collapse our collective ancestors into a singular "divine" presence, and the risks of outsourcing human decision-making to "perfect" machines.

 

About Enzai: Enzai is the enterprise AI governance platform that helps organizations maximize AI adoption while minimizing risk across global regulatory frameworks

Learn more about Enzai: www.enz.ai

Subscribe to our newsletter for more insights: www.enz.ai/contact/newsletter