From here to eternity: The
Madison Reidy meets a soul man who’ll help you live for ever.
SOUL Machines has created eight virtual twins so far and digital Rachel is one of them.
The digital-human is a facsimile of company employee Rachel Love, though she was renamed and used by Air New Zealand as an ambassador last year.
The pair are strikingly similar, even if their eyes are different colours: Love has blue eyes, digital Rachel’s are brown.
Digital Rachel reacts like any human might. Smile, and she smiles back. Clap abruptly in her face and she is startled.
But she is not human. She is software. She has a face, and is programmed to be ‘‘emotionally responsive’’, but she lives within a computer.
The New Zealand-based artificial intelligence company’s creation represents a latest step in our journey to achieving immortality.
Soul Machines wants to make life after death a reality by allowing us to exchange our blood and tissue for pixels and hardware to create digital clones of ourselves.
It aims to make digital humans a mainstream option within a decade.
As the pair spent time together, digital Rachel learned Love’s mannerisms, personality and politeness, downloading it all into her virtual nervous system – a digital brain built to work like a human brain.
It is a technological revolution Soul Machines’ engineers, neuroscientists and psychologists have spent years developing.
When she sees a person, Rachel is programmed to recognise facial expressions and speech and respond appropriately.
The system’s intricacy includes a flow of dopamine through Rachel’s brain when someone smiles at her, notifying her to smile back. Movement tracking allows her eyes to follow a person when they shift past the screen she lives behind.
She is artificially intelligent so requires no manual control.