This Facebook Bot Will Help You Plan Your Death
Have you talked to your loved ones about what should happen if you are ever on a life support device? Probably not, especially if you’re young. A startup called LifeFolder hopes that you will be more comfortable talking to the Facebook messaging bot.
Connect with “LifeFolder’s Emily” on Facebook and you will start a half-hour conversation about what you would like at the end of your life. You can pause whenever you want. Most questions ask you to agree or disagree on a scale of 1 to 5. If you select “3,” which means you don’t know you don’t care, that statement will not appear in the resulting document.
At the end, the bot e-mails you a PDF (legally binding in certain states only) that specifies who your proxy should be in order to make decisions and describes your wishes. This is not a medical document that says you want a specific treatment, but a description of what you want your loved ones to remember. For example, a bot asks if you want people to talk to you, even if they’re not sure if you understand. And you can play the dark “would you rather” game (though Emily expresses it much better) by solving things like death or constant pain.
Founder Haje Ian Kamps says LifeFolder may eventually offer estate and funeral planning services for a fee. The bot, which is free to use, receives several pieces of publicly available information about you on Facebook (Camps claims they only use your name), and their privacy policy suggests that they can use your information to advertise their own and third-party services.
After talking with Emily, you might feel better by starting a conversation with your loved ones; Towards the end, you realize that part of her job is to help you get used to talking about death.