A computer program that clones your personality and makes decisions for you

"When you and I die, our kids aren't going to go to our tombstones, they're going to fire up our digital twins and talk to them," John Smart says. As a futurist and founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, Smart uses many names for the technology he predicts — digital twin, cyber-self, personal agent — but the concept stays the same: a computer-based version of you.

Using various strategies for gathering and organising your data, digital twins will mirror peoples' interests and values. They'll "input user writings and archived email, real time wearable smartphones (lifelogs), and verbal feedback to allow increasingly intelligent and productive guidance of the user's purchases, learning, communication, feedback, and even voting activities," Smart writes.

They'll displace much of today's information overload from regular people to their cyber-selves. And one day, Smart theorizes, these digital twins will hold conversations and have faces that mimic human emotion. "They will become increasingly like us and extensions of us," Smart says.

People already form relationships with each other's online presences. As computer science advances, the connection will only improve and strengthen — even with identities that aren't real people. "Where we're headed is creating this world in which you feel you have this thing out there looking after your values," Smart says.

For digital twins to reach their full potential, however, they require two important developments: "good conversational interfaces and semantic maps," Smart explains. While no company boasts such comprehensive abilities yet, many have started to implement similar technologies. Right now, Apple has Siri.

Microsoft has Cortana. And in the summer of 2014, a program named "Eugene Goostman," imitating a Ukrainian teen, passed the Turing Test (with some healthy scepticism). Smart, however, places great emphasis on an earlier cognitive machine: IBM's Watson, which the company claims "literally gets smarter".

Vocal technologies like Siri, Cortana, and Watson already rely on semantic maps, tools that represent relationships in data, especially language. And companies constantly improve them. And as Smart predicts, all these technologies, required to make fully functional personal agents possible, are only about five years away.