Dead people and living people will live more than before
According to a computer expert, consciousness could be uploaded onto a computer, therefore anyone could do it with their elderly parents and other loved ones.
According to the Daily Mail, Dr. Pratik Desai, who has launched numerous Silicon Valley AI startups, there is a “100% chance” that family members would “live with you forever” if people have enough video and voice recorders of their loved ones.
Desai, who developed his own ChatGPT-like technology, stated on Twitter that this ought to be feasible.
Several scientists think a new golden age of technology is about to begin as a result of the tremendous developments in AI being led by ChatGPT. The greatest brains in the world disagree on the technology, with Elon Musk and more than 1,000 other tech pioneers urging caution and warning that it may wipe out mankind. On the other hand, there are other experts, including Bill Gates, who think AI will enhance our quality of life. It also appears that other experts agree that AI will enable us to live forever.
A computer expert predicts that by the end of this year, it will be feasible to build digital humans who will live on after they pass away. Desai agrees with Gates that we can recreate our deceased loved ones as living computer avatars.
The procedure entails digitizing the person’s videos, voice recordings, documents, and images, which are then supplied to an AI system to help it understand as much as it can about the person.
Then, users can create an avatar that precisely resembles their living relative in terms of appearance and behavior. In fact, the development of ChatGPT has helped a company that creates virtual people. A virtual reality robot of a human with the same speech patterns and demeanor as the subject has been created by the Live Forever project.
The Live Forever founder, Artur Sychov, estimated that the technology would be available in five years, but he now believes that it will only take a short while thanks to recent developments in AI.
‘We can take this data and apply AI to it and recreate you as an avatar on your land parcel or inside your NFT world, and people will be able to come and talk to you’, Sychov told Motherboard.
‘You will meet the person. And you would maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.’
Another AI company, DeepBrain AI, has built a memorial hall where people can have an immersive encounter with their deceased loved ones. The Rememory service makes use of pictures, videos, and a seven-hour interview with the subject while they are still alive.
The 400-inch screen that houses the AI-powered virtual human uses deep learning technology to recreate the person’s voice and appearance. A woman and her seven-year-old daughter, who passed away in 2016, reunited in 2020 with the use of virtual reality on a Korean television program.
The tragedy of a family’s loss of their seven-year-old daughter Nayeon was told in the show “Meeting You”. The young girl told her mother that she was no longer in pain as they were able to touch, play, and converse. Nayeon’s mother Jang Ji-sung donned the Vive virtual reality headset and was whisked away into a garden where her daughter was grinning while wearing a vibrant purple dress.
‘Oh my pretty, I have missed you,’ the mother can be heard saying as she strokes the digital replica of her daughter.
Desai gave little information about his proposed technology, but former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil is also developing a digital afterlife for people, with the intention of bringing back his father from the dead. The 75-year-old Kurzweil claimed his father passed away when he was 22 years old and he hopes to one day communicate with him using technology.
‘I will be able to talk to this re-creation,’ he told BBC in 2012. ‘Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father’.
Kurzweil revealed that he is digitizing hundreds of boxes that include his father’s recordings, documents, movies, and photos.
‘A very good way to express all of this documentation would be to create an avatar that an AI would create that would be as much like my father as possible, given the information we have about him, including possibly his DNA’, Kurzweil said.
The scientist went on to say that his digitized father will go through a Turing Test, which measures a machine’s capacity to behave intelligently in a way that is comparable to or impossible to differentiate from human behavior.
‘If an entity passes the Turing test, let alone a specific person, that person is conscious’, Kurzweil said.
Although considering a machine that passes the Turing test to be ‘conscious’ is quite improper since even a perfect simulation of a conversation with a machine does not necessarily imply the presence of ‘consciousness.’
In addition to downloading memories from the dead, Kurzweil believes that people will become immortal in just eight more years. He recently spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio about the development of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he thinks will result in ‘nanobots‘ that can turn back the hands of time.
These microscopic robots will fix harmed tissues and cells that degenerate as we age, protecting us from diseases like cancer. Though Kurzweil was already foreseeing technological advancements when he was hired by Google in 2012 to “work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing”.
He stated in 1990 that the greatest chess player in the world would be defeated by a computer by the year 2000, and Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in that year. Another shocking forecast made by Kurzweil in 1999 was that by 2023, a $1,000 laptop would have the processing and memory of a human brain.
According to him, connecting machines to our neocortex would enable us to think more intelligently. Machines are already enhancing our intelligence. He thinks that integrating computers into our brains will make us better, in contrast to some people’s concerns.
‘We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier’, he said.
‘We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree’.
Kurzweil thinks we will develop a human-machine synthesis that will improve us rather than a future in which machines overthrow humanity. Science fiction has long explored the idea of implanting nanomachines within the human body.
In short, avatars of loved ones could help to feel less traumatic a loss, it could lead to pathologic relationships with a character who isn’t real. People could convince themselves they are talking with a real person and they won’t ever get enough. In a sense, this could get their grieving worse.
It seems like what happens in the movie The Final Cut with Robin Williams where in a future society where implanted microchips record every moment of a person’s life from their perspective after a person dies, a “cutter” uses this recorded footage to create a highlight reel of their life to be played at their funeral. But it also echoes back to an episode of Black Mirror that led to the creation of a GPT chatbot called Replika.
Regarding the nanobots instead, it may look scary being integrated with artificial parts that alter our bodies in a such drastic way. Although it may be helpful to cure some diseases, this could lead us to be less human. This also means there will be more powerful humans that could take advantage of their power against those who haven’t this possibility.
