Eterni.me - Become Virtually Immortal
eterni.me
A team of engineers, designers and business people at MIT EDP tries to defeat death by preserving your memories into an intelligent avatar, that can interact with your close ones after you pass away.
eterni.me
However, this sounds ridiculous. The worst and most tone deaf example of how ridiculous this sounds is the part that shows an image of the deceased person with, "Hello Mike! Remember that time we went fishing?" with a spot for a reply.
I mean this literally, not rhetorically: who would honestly engage in that type of "conversation"? If you were someone who truly loved the deceased person and mourns their loss, I simply can't imagine this "conversation" taking place, unless you are in a spot of such grief and emotional pain that you're no longer able to cope and will grasp any straw that is offered. If you didn't truly love the deceased person, perhaps you would engage this way just for kicks? But it's still weird.
Still, the ability to dynamically generate a topical chat bot from a corpus of digital artifacts is interesting. I'm currently envisioning their work as a natural language parser front end with subject specific response decoration and a machine learning algorithm to trigger "self-initiated" conversation and topic selection.
Too much what, not enough why IMO.
"Would you like to talk more about Mike I miss you so much and wish you were still alive?"
When we reach that phase, would a simulation of your deceased loved one be a comfort?
I think we're getting into philosophy of mind, here.
Essentially, all this would be is a weirdly accurate and strangely formatted series of snapshots. Not a simulation really at all, but an electronic scrapbook.
I believe it would be. It would give a grieving widow someone to grow old with. It would give adult children someone to brag to. It would give abused family members someone to finally confront without fear of physical retribution. It would open up that person's personality to experience the combined knowledge of all humanity on-line. I want that. I think others do, too.
Anyway. What I really meant is that this is marketed as you 2.0 essentially, and it's just not. For all intents and purposes, it's an electronic scrapbook.
For at least the next 3 decades. But maybe after that...
And if you’re not familiar with the series, you really ought to give it a go! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)
When first reading through it I thought it was going to be some kind of digital journal or time capsule thing, maybe one that has strong guarantees against data loss.
But then I got to the part about interacting with the virtual you.
They're trying to emulate a person, a (formerly) living, breathing person, by looking at them from the outside. And then they want to speak for that person.
Am I the only one who's bothered by this? Who finds this disrespectful? They're trying to emulate you based on the things you share with them, presumably. But that is a very far cry from preserving the person as a whole, and presenting it that way is disingenuous. Because you won't be interacting with that person. That person is gone. You'll be interacting with a crude facsimile of that person's branding.
If I were to have immortality, I'd much rather have it by not dying.
Another point for team Gibson.
1A small flax hut
Adjacent to large boulder shaped like waffle iron
Fjordland National Park, New ZealandThe "I see dead people" pitch is veneer of scientific respectability, to get academic funding. Marketing spam is the intended application.
I'd still like to see why they think they can do better than what's already out there. Especially if they're making a play for academic funding, they need to publish something.
Note: this comment is without the benefit of searching for each of the team members prior works; if the company is not pointing to any particular technique or publication I'm not enthused enough to dig deeper.
This seems more like another memorial service that may make sense with the kind of in-roads technology, the Internet, and social media are making into more and more lives. I think an interesting application of this would be having QR codes that match up with digital memorials like on headstones, or in-line akin to a hyper text function in epitaphs.
It's not necessarily something I might want for myself or loved ones, but this is a fascinating aspect of how people deal with death and a person's digital life.
I have no problem with "digital immortality", and I think it can be a good idea, but only as long as people themselves want it to remain immortal, rather than being collected NSA-style.
The difference is that you may not want to save all of your sex scandals, and porn watching habits, forever, but only certain information - like a biography. That's why it needs to be voluntary, and you need to know exactly what it is you're giving them to store for you.
A project claiming to offer digital immortality I think would need to offer at least one of two particular features to live up to that description. (A) It would have to directly augment the human body to extend its lifetime indefinitely or (B) it would need to emulate the target human in such a way as to provide extensional equality. Extensional equality [1] in this context I think would mean that for any given situation, the human and the emulator would need to behave equivalently. This automatically entails that it would need to have the same thoughts, contain the same memories, etc to provide the necessary context for its decision-making.
Neither (A) or (B) consider any ethical implications of course. I'm just musing off the top of my head. My point is that although I think eterni.me could still pan out to be a cool project, it falls short of achieving digital immortality.
Even with the limited technology today, with enough material you could create a passable replica of a person's writing style, stories, opinions, etc. Of course, that is a very shallow "solution" to death... but it is better than nothing.
How much would you pay to be able to have this shallow conversation with your great-great-grandfather?
Considering how much people pay for ancestry research stuff, I'd guess most people would pay a lot for that.
I don't infer predatory intent by the creators, but the above seem far and away the largest groups of likely customers.
What I imagine would prove more successful due to viral potential while also being more socially constructive is if the same technology were used to simulate famous historical figures. Tweet the most poignant quote from your conversation with Frida Kahlo. Or Dostoyevsky... though that would probably need to be an FB or blog post.
"In the novel's somewhat dystopian world, human personalities can be stored digitally and downloaded into new bodies, called sleeves. Most people have cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their memories. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon)
In addition, the stacks can be hooked up to a rig that allows living people to interact with the sleeve-less stack in virtual reality (this is also used for interrogation and torture).
When machine interaction gets 'her'-like, this kind of thing might be something. Until then, it's just going to be creepy.
I bet BING buys this to challenge google in AI!