How technology affects the desire to leave a memory for posterity and, most importantly, how it works, learned the host of the Industry 4.0 YouTube channel Nikolai Dubinin
Creating a digital twin, a chatbot of a deceased person, the ability to communicate with loved ones when they are no longer around – all this is no longer a fantasy. A new Death Tech industry is emerging in the world. What it is?
The Black Mirror series has an episode on this subject. It’s called Be right back or “I’ll be right back.” A girl whose boyfriend died in a car accident is having a hard time with the loss. She learns that a technology has appeared that makes it possible to communicate with a digital copy of the deceased. The series was released in February 2013, and then everyone thought that these were just the director’s fantasies. Now this is reality. Thanks to Death Tech, a person can theoretically upload their thoughts and memories into a computer and live forever as a machine.
Another case of digitization of the deceased – but in real life – occurred in 2020. American parents who lost their son in a mass shooting two years ago have used deepfake technology to recreate him for a public service announcement.
And recently, rapper Kanye West gave his wife Kim Kardashian a talking hologram of her deceased father Robert for her birthday.
“Resurrection” in VR
In 2016, a South Korean woman lost her seven-year-old daughter to leukemia. The ashes of the girl were placed in a pendant. For eight months, the documentary team recreated the girl in VR in detail: appearance, voice, facial expressions. They also drew a park where mother and daughter used to walk.
How does it work?
The rebuilding process was expensive and difficult. For this, not only photos and videos of the girl were needed, but also a technology that would allow them to be transferred to a 3D model. Cameras from different angles photographed a young actress who looked like a dead girl, the program combined all the pictures, and a 3D model of the child was obtained.
But what to do with the voice? Today you can generate any text with absolutely any voice. The neural network recognizes timbre, melody, sound, and can also create text using voice, even if a person has never spoken it. It was this technology that allowed the virtual girl to look so convincing on the video.
Bot from a dead person
There is another way to communicate with a dead person – creating a bot. For example, in 2016, a startup with Russian roots, Luka, launched a chatbot with a young man, Roman Mazurenko, who died in an accident. The main purpose of this “digital monument” was to prolong Roman’s life. The project was then condemned on the Web. But he was reborn and now exists as a digital interlocutor – the user creates a character and begins to correspond with him.
Another similar case: a few years ago, journalist James Vlahos, before the death of his father, who had cancer, recorded several interviews with him. He then used the Pull String program to have artificial intelligence turn his father’s speech into a chatbot.
How does it work?
There is an AI printing model. It is arranged as follows: the bot first speaks, and then listens to the user’s answers, on the basis of which it processes the next series of its words and phrases. As a result, Vlahos came up with an application that can communicate like his deceased dad. It’s called Dadbot.
This idea has become popular. That is why the journalist created the Here After company so that others can create digital avatars of their deceased relatives.
But how to digitize what is happening in our head in order to save it? There is no need to look for the answer in the distant future either. There is a startup called Nectome. The system he developed cuts the brain into thousands of microthin slices and stores the identified neural network. There is only one drawback – these will be physical pieces of the brain preserved even before death. Therefore, in this case, a volunteer will be needed.
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