Yes you heard me, I will become a robot, well AI (AI = Artificial intelligence, think Siri). Why? I want my children, my childrens-children to be able to talk to me as if I were there. I want to be immortal, and I believe we will soon have the tech to make this happen.
As an AI, You could share memories from your childhood, as if we were right there with you. Your great granddaughter in 2100 wants to find out what life was like in 2016, she could ask the AI version of yourself who would respond with videos from that memory, old tweets, and facebook videos.
Your granddaughter could build a virtual relationship with you, get a better understanding of how you were back then. Your thoughts, your dreams and your ambitions and experiences at any age. I could give her advice, advice on life decisions from my perspective, even silly ones on what choice of pizza.
Look at how much data we produce from our social media. That could be collated into a database put into an algorithm, creating a ‘Siri’ version of ourselves.
How it can be possible
Eterni.me is a company that want us to ‘preserve our most important thoughts, stories and memories for eternity.’
We’re trying to make it clear that it’s not replacing a person, but trying to preserve as much of the information one generates
Marius Ursache, CEO of Eterni.me
Eterni.Me promise us that we could “become virtually immortal” by collecting our thoughts, stories and memories; to curate them and create an intelligent avatar that looks like you. Rather than leaving a few photos, home videos a diary or an autobiography we can create something that will allow us to be remembered forever.
In order for this to happen, we would have to upload extensive data, being specific “text-intensive social networks and environments” such as Facebook, Twitter and email to the AI algorithms.
Eventually, moving onto photos, videos, audio and location data. The AI will be able to source this information and use it appropriately. Someone could ask the virtual me “What was your best restaurant in South London” and the AI me will send back a picture of what I visited and directions. This kind of ideal machine learning is a way off, but we’re already seeing glimpses of it with natural language research such as that done by Nuance.
Luka
An App called Luka works similarly. Co-founder, Eugenia Kuyda developed a chatbot that lets anyone talk to her dearly departed best friend Roman. She was quoted saying ‘[she] used thousands of texts sent between us, photos, articles about him and then we built a Roman AI.’ You can text with him about his life or just chat like you normally would — he will reply like Roman would have. She fed the messages into the neural network being developed for the Luka app, in order to make a bot that tried to mimic an actual human’s speech patterns to create believable sounding lines of dialogue. Read more here: The Verge.
Fears
Privacy concerns, because they’ll be some information you don’t want some people to know, like imagine if your mum saw your tweets, yikes. We have Facebook for Family, we don’t need them to see our twitter side ha! There should be controls so we can choose we sort of information some people see, what if we want 10 of our closest friends to see our deeper secrets and no one else. Or what if we want our profiles to be available for public use, like Siri or just private.
Thoughts
It also means trusting that AI to know what’s important about you, and what’s not. More than that, it means trusting it to know what’s important about you to; your sister, your mother, your child — everyone sees you differently and everyone will want to remember a different part of you. You might even want different people to hold different images of you, according to how you present yourself already.
Can you imagine how it would’ve been if you could preserve Socrates or Einstein?
Beyond thinking of myself, imagine if we could have (virtually) preserved Socrates, Einstein, Michael Jackson and so on. The conversations you could have, talking to them as if they were alive. You ask Einstein a question for your assignment that is due tomorrow, maybe an acquisition. You could ask Socrates how he came to his conclusions or what he eat for dinner.
This would better than reading a book on them, going to Wikipedia this could like you sitting with them at a cafe, picking their mind. An interactive history of the past, current and future generations. This sort of software could be an invaluable treasure for humanity, the next frontier of education.
Future beyond the Future
Now I’m thinking about the possibilities, maybe I turn myself into an actual virtual assistant. So rather than the public having access to my information, I can help you like Siri does or like Jarvis in Ironman but with just a bit more Sam (me) swag. Maybe I can become a virtual avatar, where you put on your VR headset and you see a graphically generated version of me, so you could have a closer relationship as if I were next to you in real life.
These robots will learn from mistakes that are being made to make sure my character is consistent. I ponder, as they fully understand who I am, will they be able to assume and produce fitting replies I have not delivered by learning more about my character. Possibly turning me into an actual robot.
There is technology where computers are beginning to learn how to speak without the use of the human voice. What if a computer got to understand how I speak and spoke as if I was the phone, giving responses like the voice recognition used in customer service bots (they’re so cool).
When we die, much of our legacy these days lies in the exchanges of text we make on our mobile phones, through email, social media, and chat messengers. So what if we could turn all that data into a digital avatar? Would you?
if you want to read more about these ideas:
SafeBeyond allows the dead to reach out beyond the grave to loved ones
Heavenote: ‘Messages from Heaven’ lets the dead text from beyond the grave
