Afterlife Bots - A Dead Man's Petition

No, neither am I a Ted-famous Tech geek spiritual guru nor am I in contact with the afterlife. I am just fascinated by the buzzwords "Machine Learning" and "AI" and a little overwhelmed by the number of articles mentioning those words on my news feed.

I remember reading a line in a news article that "Bots are getting better at imitating humans". Why not hire one and decrease workload by 50%. Well, I suppose we are working towards it.

Google recently announced that their AI-enabled assistant (with 6 voices) can book a hair-cut appointment seamlessly (Well I want a shave as well, and I want it to go and do grocery shopping handpicking the freshest tomatoes from the lot).

Jokes apart: kudos to the team of brilliant scientists, engineers, and others who are working day and night to make this happen.

Coming back to my original story.

Let's start with Human life (and relationships) - Data Gathering

"Quite a digital world". We are capturing and storing our personal life events as much as we can digitally (Thanks to social media, external hard disks, and pen-drives). Why not store our entire life in a 1000 Petabyte storage device. Capture every second - actions, events, habits, decisions, etc.

Imagine if we can see and experience our parents' childhood or see "What all Mahatma Gandhi did in his entire life". Interesting right?

We all know how quickly robotics, machine learning, and AI are evolving.

What if we combine robotics, machine learning, and human life data? Can we create a human replica bot which would respond similarly, make decisions similarly, have similar habits basis the 1000 Petabyte data fed. All in all, can that bot be my replacement after my death?. Can it be my AFTER-LIFE BOT?

Literally, nothing can replace a dead human being. I was not fortunate to see my grandfather or meet him. But will my great grand/grandkids know about me? The answer is I do not know. We all are striving hard to leave a legacy behind us. Why not use robots and machine intelligence to duplicate ourselves. We do have ample amount of data to feed ~79 years (average age of human being) or ~2 Billion moments. Don't you want your great grandkids to remember you after you are gone?

With a simple Google search, I got a news article mentioning "Mind Clone" - the idea of uploading the memories, thoughts, and feelings of a person into a computer. It mentions that the companies such as eterni.me, Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits, and Terasem's Lifenaut are all pursuing Mind Clone to help a person's personality, work and relationships survive after death.

I certainly hope this idea to grow exponentially and who knows "Milind2122" might be replying to the comments below after 200 years.

Disclaimer: Please consider the content and ideas as figments of the imagination of a sleepless middle-age guy striving hard to keep his brain functioning.

By Milind Kinker