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In season two of a Black Mirror episode entitled “Be Right Back” a woman is able to “revive” her dead boyfriend by having a company create a artificial intelligence (AI) version of him.
Sound far fetched? It might have when the episode first aired in 2013.
Now? Not so much.
According to an expert on the subject, Dr. Ajaz Ali, Head of Business and Computing at Ravensbourne University, we aren’t that far away from humans being able to upload their minds to computers and created a digital “twin” so we can all “live” on after death.
“By linking AI with digital technologies and motion capture tools, our conscious, knowledge and experiences will be transferred to our digital twins,” Dr. Ali told the Daily Mail in an interview.
“Using NLP based tools which will be way more advanced than ChatGPT and Bard, people will be able to interact with these digital twins in real time and benefit from their knowledge and ideas.
“Loved ones could carry on interacting with their relatives who have already died but exist in a digital twin form.”
So how close are we to this happening, really?
Well, in January of 2021, Microsoft received a patent that will allow them to create a AI chatbot using personal information about dead people, including things like their images, voices, social media posts, and electronic messages
“In aspects, social data (e.g., images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, written letters, etc.) about the specific person may be accessed,” reads the patent description. “The social data may be used to create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person’s personality. The special index may be used to train a chat bot to converse in the personality of the specific person.”
On top of all that, they also added, “A 2D or 3D model of a specific person may be generated.”
Not to be left out, last year Amazon showed how they can synthesize the voice of a dead person for use by Alexa.
“This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording in the studio,” said Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa Rohit Prasad. “The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path.
“We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fictions are becoming a reality.”
It’s such a “golden era” that hundreds of top technologists have asked everyone in their industry to halt their work because even they’re a little freaked out.