Eterni.me - Become Virtually Immortal

by mariusursache • 12 years ago

26 50 12 years ago

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.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I hope they intend to collect the data the people are willingly giving to them, and not just collecting it from the Internet or wherever they find it.

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.

frugalfirbolg3• 12 years ago

I'd love to see some publications from their R&D to outline how this won't turn into another one of those chat bot apps that you can have write Facebook posts in your style based on frequency analysis of your past posts.

gohrt• 12 years ago

You are looking at it backwards....

The "I see dead people" pitch is veneer of scientific respectability, to get academic funding. Marketing spam is the intended application.

frugalfirbolg3• 12 years ago

No doubt it will be used for marketing spam. I can just imagine my digital ghost telling anecdotes about how in my day and age Intel was a respectable company and that most of my computers used their CPUs, so my ancestor should consider them for their computing needs... <sigh> reminds me of a Futurama episode.

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.

adriand• 12 years ago

I've had a somewhat similar idea related to storing memories and I suspect that it's a fairly common idea that's occurred to lots of us.

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.

moocowduckquack2• 12 years ago

Is the same distinction Gibson draws with the Dixie Flatline construct in Neuromancer. Constructs aren't AI and they aren't the person neither.

frugalfirbolg3• 12 years ago

Sadly their marketing pitch does not convey an understanding of human interactions. The example you pointed out is reminiscent of a bad Turing test chat bot with a lexicon of topics to crawl through.

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.

chadwickthebold3• 12 years ago

I think their marketing pitch may be reflective of a lack of understanding of human interaction on the part of the founding team. 5 engineers, a business exec, and two HR people - but no psychologists or social scientists.

Too much what, not enough why IMO.

HillRat• 12 years ago

"Mike, I miss you so much and wish you were still alive."

"Would you like to talk more about Mike I miss you so much and wish you were still alive?"

somewhatjustin2• 12 years ago

There would be no extra information coming in, so the conversations would quickly become repetitive.

lebek2• 12 years ago

The conversation itself is new information.

woodchuck643• 12 years ago

Let's grant that while technology today has a long ways to go, we will eventually be able to record enough memories and provide enough computational power to simulate human behavior.

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.

Loughla2• 12 years ago

I'm not certain that even at that phase it would be a simulation of the deceased. What makes us, us, and makes us want to interact with other humans on a regular basis, is that everyone changes. A static person doesn't exist.

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.

chadwickthebold3• 12 years ago

In the end, you are still dead. Living people interacting with a digital mishmash of your digital leavings seems both disingenuous and kind of creepy.

angersock• 12 years ago

Achievement unlocked: Dixie Flatline.

Another point for team Gibson.

stewdio• 12 years ago

Wasn’t this an episode of Black Mirror? In particular this season 2 episode titled “Be right back”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-iZTSC9Ml8

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)

parley• 12 years ago

I must second this. An excellent series with nice twists and dilemmas!

nathan_f772• 12 years ago

Agree, I loved this series. I also highly recommend the movie 'Her'.

glomph• 12 years ago

Really weird. I wonder if they have seen it.

moocowduckquack2• 12 years ago

I know that care in spelling is not a good way of judging stuff like this, but I am not sure I have much faith in their Artificial Intelligence algorhitms (sic).

Zikes• 12 years ago

So it's a series of cleverbots each seeded by only a single person?

Kronopath• 12 years ago

This is really unsettling.

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.

lebek2• 12 years ago

If chat logs are incorporated into the model the emulation might be quite realistic, to a point.

polarix2• 12 years ago

Better still would be to incorporate the expectations of people who interacted with the person; unfortunately even the conscious memories of living beings are currently rather hard to access.

polarix2• 12 years ago

You do have that option. Unfortunately, this is the best we can offer to people who have already died.

iwasphone• 12 years ago

%s/algorhitms/algorithms/g

aaronem• 12 years ago

Well! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who finds this outright horrifying.

adamfeldman• 12 years ago

Straight out of Altered Carbon (the Takeshi Kovacs series of novels by Richard K. Morgan):

"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).

octaveguin• 12 years ago

This seems like it will suffer from a very large uncanny alley of sorts where photographs and videos don't because they aren't trying to be realistic.

When machine interaction gets 'her'-like, this kind of thing might be something. Until then, it's just going to be creepy.

brandynwhite• 12 years ago

Exactly like Caprica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_(TV_series)

yarou• 12 years ago

Great idea, I've been thinking about a similar system. Wish you the best of luck Marius, all you'd need now is a human scale robot that can project a composite image of the deceased, and voila! You've become a digital necromancer.

CompleteMoron• 12 years ago

this is creepy in every way - like the time a friend of mine suggested he could get rich doing funeral videos the way people pay for wedding videos.

I bet BING buys this to challenge google in AI!

sirduncan• 12 years ago

Anyone ever see the weird, underrated Robin Williams movie "The Final Cut"? That was the first thing that came to my mind. Same basic concept

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_30

eddywebs• 12 years ago

*algorithm is spelled wrong in the index page >> "algorhithms"

swombat• 12 years ago

This is mis-pitched in the sense that it shouldn't be pitched at you to have a conversation with your deceased dad... it should be pitched at you to enable your great-great-grandchildren to have a conversation with their long-deceased great-great-grandfather (or -mother).

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.

tels• 12 years ago

( codependent ( target demographic ) wealthy ) ( narcissistic ( target demographic ) wealthy )

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.

epenn• 12 years ago

I think immortality of any kind is a poor description for what this actually offers. This seems like a chatbot with a deeper personal context to work with, which is cool and interesting in and of itself, but not something that would allow for that grandiose of a description.

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensionality

svankie• 12 years ago

Horrifying. This sounds exactly like "Be Right Back"[0] from the Black Mirror series.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/

somewhatjustin2• 12 years ago

So I would give them some of the things I've created, but it's only accessible via chat? I'm all for a time capsule, but not in this format.

rak• 12 years ago

This makes me wonder how far away something like the "Be Right Back" episode of Black Mirror, as others have already mentioned.

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.

chadwickthebold3• 12 years ago

It gets really scary when you imagine that the path to monetization for this thing might be advertising. Great, I can remember that fishing trip I took with grandpa, but he'll be subtlety shilling for some online retailer at the same time.

krapp• 12 years ago

More likely, appliances and devices will be given personalities and 'avatars' meant to interact with their owners in a humanlike fashion, both in 'reality' and online, and these personalities will be subtly tweaked to resemble those of their relatives, and projected models of the sort of person they might find attractive.

RyanZAG• 12 years ago

Given that this is entirely an AI project - and an amazingly difficult one at that - the lack of AI researchers in the people section is a huge red flag. Looks like a VC cash grab more than a real project. Good luck to them, although I feel sorry for any VC involved.

ElliotH• 12 years ago

I love how unsettling this is. I'm unconvinced that it will work well, and doubly unconvinced that anyone will use it, but surely all the most exciting ideas are ones that scare us a little?

squidsoup• 12 years ago

If this is satirical, well done - it's both horrifying and hilarious. If not, please forward my communications to:

    1A small flax hut
    Adjacent to large boulder shaped like waffle iron 
    Fjordland National Park, New Zealand

nathan_f772• 12 years ago

I don't trust that this company will be alive in 50 years. I wouldn't even trust Google or Facebook with a task like this. Who can guarantee that any company will be around in 1,000 years.

rmidthun• 12 years ago

Once again, Max Headroom proves to be the most prophetic show of the 80s. "Deities" has a church using exactly this sort of technology to offer "immortality".

Eterni.me - Become Virtually Immortal

Related Stories