Your life’s data means avatar of yourself could live forever
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he’s dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it.
Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual “consultant” when the actual CEO is gone.
Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyses personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company’s execs. “I’m not a fan of that company’s leadership,” the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval.
Creepy? Maybe, but Rahnama believes we’ll come to embrace the digital afterlife. An entrepreneur and researcher based at Ryerson University in Toronto, and a visiting faculty member at MIT’s Media Lab, he’s building an application called Augmented Eternity; it lets you create a digital persona that can interact with people on your behalf after you’re dead.
Even as we speak, the digital remains of the dead accumulate. Something like 1.7 million Facebook users pass away each year. Some online accounts of the dead are deleted, while others linger in perpetual silence. “We are generating gigabytes of data on a daily basis,” Rahnama says. “We now have a lot of data, we have a lot of processing power, we have a lot of storage capability.” With enough data about how you communicate and interact with others, machine-learning algorithms can approximate your unique personality—or at least some part of it.
And what would the digital “you” look like? Well, what do you want it to look like? It might be a text-based chatbot like the CEO’s or an audio voice like Siri or a digitally edited video or a 3-D animated character in a virtualreality environment. It might be embedded in a humanoid robot.
We’re not there quite yet. It’s hard enough to create software agents that can carry on a naturalsounding conversation, let alone capture the personality of a specific person.
There’s no software that can interact, communicate, and make decisions the way you do. Rahnama says the CEO’s avatar will be a “decision support tool,” but it won’t be capable of running the company.
“There is one thing that is missing in AI (artificial intelligence) today, and that is context,” he says. Most chatbots simply offer responses based on the content of a conversation, but our communication changes depending on who we’re talking to, where we are, and what time of day it is. The need to include this kind of context was the basis for Rahnama’s company, Flybits. Flybits provides a platform that lets companies tailor their communications to customers on the basis of contextual cues. A bank, for example, might offer different messages through its mobile app depending on your purchase history, your calendar schedule, or whether you’re walking or taking a train.
Creepy? Maybe, but Rahnama believes we’ll all come to embrace the digital afterlife.— MIT News
We are generating gigabytes of data on a daily basis. We now have a lot of data, we have a lot of processing power, we have a lot of storage capability. – Hossein Rahnama, entrepreneur and researcher