Outsourcing My Self Perspective to a Deadbot?

The Afterlife is digitized, and the revolution WILL be broadcast.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court

I'm very grateful for Photos.google.com.  There are now decades of photos I can find very quickly. And it includes a lot of digital photos I took of hard copy photos.

And I'm very grateful that wonderful things from artists like Gahan Wilson and Gary Larson and George Carlin (whose comments on the history of the FCC were very topical again, this week. Freedom of Speech should be safe as long as we have volume, channel changing, and other knobs availalbe).

Less grateful that Blogger delists older posts which included hot links that are now dead links.  In 2008, if this blog linked to a current story of 2008, and that link (often to a youtube video, which is another google archive topic) is now 404, the blogspot post linking to that 404 effectively becomes 404.

Understandably, this may be a necessary way to prevent AI from generating millions of blogspot posts and billions of youtube videos. But AI will probably have more time to figure its way past the gatekeepers than I will have time for to go back and edit 17 year old blog posts.

This is the reason I'm now entertaining the idea of outsourcing my blog to my own "Deadbot".

So far, the digitization of thoughts and opinions and images and voice has been marketed as a way to preserve a dearly departed "dead" one - hence the term "dead-bot". And that raises questions - would my parents have wanted me to do that? My father Bill Ingenthron worshiped his grandparents - but they instructed him to burn their love letters (he didn't). So it's an "ethics of recycling" topic.

But I'm in a position to recycle myself. I could outsource my engagement with society - which has always been above and beyond the societal mean. There is a big digital record of my thoughts and opinions, starting with articles and editorials I wrote in the trade press (see academia.edu profile), continuing with the blog, and I'm always piping up on Linkedin and Facebook (to the alarm and consternation of my most significant other person in my life).

Environmental Morality Debate: ADC is Landfilling. Exporting is Dumping. You're Throwing Away. Garbage!

1980s Moral/Environmental Superiority

"You threw your television away??  I reused it.  I sold mine at a yard sale, or donated it to a charity.

Yours went into a landfill where it will be blown in the wind and seep into the groundwater!"

1990s Moral/Environmental Superiority

"You threw your television and computer away??  I reused my computer, and the television was recycled back into a new television, the plastic, metal and glass reused.

Yours went into a landfill where it will be blown in the wind and seep into the groundwater!"

2000s Moral/Environmental Superiority 

"You threw your TV, PC and cell phone away??  I reused my cell phone.   The TV and computer were recycled back into new metals, plastic and glass products.

Yours went into a landfill where it will be blown in the wind and seep into the groundwater!  Or worse, got shipped to a country with poor people."

2010's  Moral/Environmental Superiority  

"You threw your TV, PC and cell phone away??  I sent mine to a shredding machine.   The metal and some of the plastic were recycled back into new metals and plastics.

The leaded glass from mine went on top of yours, as wind cover.  Like yours, it will be blown by the wind and seep into groundwater.

But mine will be on a layer on top of yours today.  Tomorrow, when the landfill reopens, another CRT will be dumped on top of my "yester-daily cover".  And another layer of shedded CRTs will be placed on that.  And so on..."

Environmental Moral superiority just ain't what it used to be.

In certified programs, almost nothing gets reused anymore.

This is "moral relativism" not across geographic boundaries, but across decades and their relative economies.

What does this "moral environmentalist standards evolution" tell us about Environmentalism?  Harken back to the Priestatollah Blog ("E-Waste Whiplash").  Beware moral fetishes attached to scientific environmental problems.   Environmental health studies, like human health and medicine, need to stay firmly in the science camp, and let's keep our ears, eyes, and minds open to scientific method, healthy reasoning.