Your Digital Afterlife - AI and the Metaverse
A proverb tells us that when an elder dies, a library is burned to the ground. The sentiment is short, vivid, profound. Those who are oldest among us have had the opportunity to gather years of knowledge and practical wisdom, and when they’re gone from this world we lose access to all of the insights they’ve gained. I’m sure we’ve all thought about somebody we’ve lost when we needed some piece of advice that they were great at giving, or wondered something about their lives that we wish we had asked them when we had the chance. Beyond information and utility, sometimes we just miss somebody and long for the chance to talk with them again.
As with many things in the modern day, more than one group has proposed a solution in the form of AI. And it’s bringing up some very mixed emotions.
One of the first of these groups to gain attention as a startup was eterni.me (or Eternime), billing itself as a sort of Skype chatbot that learns from a digital repository filled with all of your social media posts and everything else you upload to it for the rest of your life. The original team behind eterni.me launched at a 2014 intensive entrepreneurship program at MIT, and created what they thought would be a simple website just to indicate what they were about and share outside of their initial friend group. They got 3,000 registrations within 48 hours of the site going live. Beyond this, the company’s founder recalls getting emails from people with terminal illnesses, trying to participate as soon as possible and willing to pay whatever the program cost.
Early prototypes emerged from the project in 2015, showing a user interfacing with a program which asks it a series of questions about their life and past. These range from simple questions like favorite color, to deeper questions such as asking information about their childhood best friend or their earliest memory in life. In one prototype, the program compiles an avatar with the user’s likeness which is animated and uses a text-to-speech system to vocalize answers. This drew criticism in focus groups for being creepy, owing largely to the uncanny valley effect. Since then, researching the company continues to pull up articles referring to the company as a “new startup” or “coming soon” - indicating that perhaps building out the infrastructure they imagined is far more complicated than expected. But delays now are no reason to assume that the technology won’t be brought to life.
Eternime is not the only company working on this kind of technology currently. Microsoft filed a patent in 2017 for creating a chatbot of a person based on their conversational patterns, and this patent extended the capability to creating a 2D or 3D representation of the person as well as creating a voice font for text to speech capabilities. This raised some eyebrows when it was posted on Twitter, which elicited a response from Microsoft’s general AI program manager O’Brien. O’Brien stated that the patent was filed prior to the creation of Microsoft’s AI ethics reviews and that there were no plans to implement this technology, calling it disturbing.
There’s one last group of people I want to talk about, or rather a whole movement built around their philosophy and future ideals. The Terasem Movement Foundation is a registered non-profit organization dedicated to promoting life extending technology and cyber consciousness. According to their website: “Our mission is to promote the geoethical (world ethical) use of nanotechnology for human life extension. We conduct educational programs and support scientific research and development in the areas of cryogenics, biotechnology, and cyber consciousness.”
Currently, the Terasem Movement Foundation uses their website lifenaut.com to collect “bio files” and “mind files” which are basically what they sound like. Mind files are very similar to other programs we’ve already discussed, where a person can log as many pieces of individual information and personality about themselves as they’d like, and this information will be used to create a digital representation of them. To create a bio file, you must purchase a collection kit (phrased as a $99 “donation”) in which you will receive mouthwash to swish with and spit back into a collection vial. This is sent back to TMF, who will collect the live cells from your sample and store them for an indefinite length of time at - 190 degrees fahrenheit. The website states that once you are legally declared dead, technology may have progressed to the point that your cells can be used to grow you a new body for the purpose of transferring your digital consciousness and resuming your life.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the goals of the Terasem movement are lofty or even totally impossible. Obviously if any of this were to come to fruition, it would require an extraordinary person who had been responsible for other groundbreaking technologies. Surprisingly, they may have a very strong claim to exactly that. The TMF was founded by Martine Rothblatt and her wife Bina. If you’re not familiar with Martine Rothblatt, let me attempt to list in short some of her accomplishments: Rothblatt is a lawyer and regulatory attorney who was retained by NASA, former CEO of GeoStar, Creator of both WorldSpace and SiriusX, founded biopharmaceutical company Union Therapeutics to come up with a new therapy to save her daughter from Pulmonary Hypertension, and helped create the first all-electric helicopter. She holds a Ph. D in medical ethics and numerous honorary degrees, and in 2018 was the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry. Despite the criticisms of extremely high and possibly unattainable goals (which some ha ve referred to derisively as nothing more than wishful thinking), the Terasem movement is being run by a very accomplished scientist and social thinker who has pioneered multiple technological advancements. We may have to come back and visit them in the future where there is space to explore this Foundation in much more detail.
One of the more visible projects of Lifenaut and the Terasem Movement Foundation is Bina48, a self-described “cybernetic companion” created to look and act like Martine’s wife Bina, ith her MindFile integrated to match. Today it is considered one of the most advanced social robot projects to date.
Now that we’ve looked at the players, we need to get back to the larger questions and implications at hand. Of course, at this point in time we’re still totally unable to answer any questions regarding consciousness and experiential being of artificial or digital consciousness or intelligence, but even sidestepping this minefield of philosophical debate, there’s much to uncover. Let’s look at the potential dystopian applications of this technology first, so we can end with a more uplifting note to cleanse the palette.
Ownership of self image and intellectual property is already an extremely complicated field of study. What can be done with a person’s created likeness after their death? One humorously titled Medium article posits if a person could unknowingly become the face of male enhancement advertisements after their death. Some ethical experts and futurists are now suggesting that the safest way to guard yourself from these issues now is to include your instructions for handling your digital data and likenesses in your will. But let’s assume somebody violates your wishes and uses your digital avatar without your permission. Who enforces your legal ownership and fights the violation? Your next of kin or whoever handles your estate after death might be able to, but that relies on you having somebody who is aware of the issues, willing to enforce them, and has the resources to do so legally. How many of us does that apply to? Issues of privacy, forgery, and a person’s post-mortem reputation abound when considering how many ways a person’s likeness could be manipulated after their death.
Another ethical concern is that advanced life extending technology such as this could be prohibitively expensive, essentially creating a class separation from those who can continue their life artificially and those who must die a regular death without the resources to do so. This is actually a major concern of the Terasem Movement Foundation, which was created as a non-profit with the express goal of keeping the technology as accessible and affordable as possible so that the average person could feasibly take part.
Consider the corporate world as well. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the vaguely defined “key man clause” wherein certain business agreements are contractually invalidated if a central important person leaves, dies, or is otherwise unavailable. Businesses go to great lengths to protect their projects in these cases, even taking out insurance on key people to offset important losses. Will there come a day when business between big corporations will require key people to submit to a digitization of their consciousness that will ensure their continued presence, to provide key functions in the event of their death? What if the person doesn’t die but instead leaves the project over moral or ethical concerns? Will their digital likeness have been created beforehand so that it will continue to stay and oversee the project even if that person changes their mind and no longer wants to be involved? Could we see what amounts to digital kidnapping as key people’s data profiles are stolen for corporate or even governmental espionage?
On the more gray spectrum of the issue is the question of using AI to replicate passed loved ones for the purpose of grief therapy and transitioning to life without them. The idea sounds so sci-fi that it’s literally been explored as a cautionary tale such as Black Mirror’s episode “Be Right Back”. This idea probably draws a range of responses from people, with some who might relish the idea, and some who might consider it ghastly. One particular example from data scientist Muhammad Ahmad, who created a chat bot to respond like his deceased father, is hard to read without taking the emotional impact to heart. Ahmad states he was inspired not only by his own personal drive to communicate with his father but by the idea that he didn’t yet have any children and that his future kids would have no connection to the man that their grandfather was.
Griefbots, as these programs are called, are somewhat controversial. Some do believe that they can help certain people grieve and process the loss of a person important to them. On the other hand, some worry that people could begin to lean on this digital representation of a lost loved one for their emotional regulation, and that it could possibly create an unhealthy attachment to the chatbot.
Generational preservation is a natural exploration of the possibilities of this technology. Many families have something of a family historian who creates a family tree, tracks down important coats or symbols, learns the origins of the last names and the places where ancestors and distant relatives have lived. Imagine instead a sort of virtual hall of ancestors, where you could have a conversation with many generations before you and learn lessons and history directly from their perspective - or at least a digitized reproduction of such. Considering ancestry services are already big today, I can imagine a market for a digital ancestry and family history service - and where there is market, there’s incentive for tech to develop quickly.
Now that we’ve gotten the heavy stuff out of the way, let’s look at some more positive ways this technology could be used. One project is currently working with Holocaust survivors to record in-depth interviews and gain their perspective before they are all gone. Each volunteer spends 5 days answering a broad field of questions, so that they can hopefully respond to as many questions as possible. The interview is captured by more than 20 cameras from different angles so this data can be used to compiled 3D and even holographic images in the future.
One such volunteer was Eva Kor, who recounted her experience being the subject of Dr. Josef Mengele along with her twin sister. In 2019, she died at the age of 85. After her death, Leslie Stahl was able to interview her avatar for 60 minutes. The ability to archive this kind of powerful knowledge and experience is an amazing achievement, and one which could allow us to connect with the past forever. Historical figures such as civil rights activists, scientists, important politicians and more could be archived so that future generations could learn from their original perspective. With most of the world having just gone through the Covid-19 pandemic, I have to wonder; what if the public had access to interview public health experts from the 1918 Flu pandemic? Would it have changed the way people treated the virus, and could it have changed the outcome? To my mind, it’s one of just a few possibilities as to how this technology could have a tangible impact on the future.
This has been the longest script so far that I’ve ever done on the channel, and it feels like I’m barely touching on all of the topics that will come up for debate as we continue to see advancements in digitally cataloguing and potentially even recreating the mind of a person. I think this is a good time to end here and leave you room to contemplate.
Would you consider uploading your mind to an AI-based platform? Even if it wouldn’t preserve your conscious experience at the end of your life, would you consider creating an archive for those who would come after you? Or are you not concerned with it because you won’t be around to be bothered by it if you’re recreated after death? Whatever your take on this technology, feel free to leave a comment and discuss in the comments. Thanks for sticking with me this far into the video. Until next time, it’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you.
Resources
Tim O’Brien Tweet: https://twitter.com/_TimOBrien/status/1352645952310439936?s=20
Medium article: https://medium.com/the-innovation/will-you-be-the-face-of-male-enhancements-after-you-die-1fd468fbea6d
Griefbot Article: https://medium.com/s/when-robots-rule-the-world/can-bots-help-us-deal-with-grief-3de488cae96
Terasem Movement Foundation Website: https://terasemmovementfoundation.com/
