I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality recently; a scary diagnosis for a loved one will do that to you. Nothing makes my own date with destiny more starkly visible than when I must select the year of my birth from a scrolling window on a computer screen. Ouch! The scrolling seems to go on and on and on, until eventually my year appears and I click! Note: Websites that use this input methodology need to call a user experience designer, right now!
Will my last breath be the final interaction I have with anyone? It depends, perhaps, on the meaning of “I.” Certainly, my flesh and blood body won’t be interacting with any other human being (although I have donated it to science). But will there be a digital me who can offer advice and help solve problems? Maybe even teach an up-to-date virtual class on cultural intelligence?
Too far-fetched? Well, here are the words of Dr. Hossein Rahnama, a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab and Research and Innovation director of Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone:
“My ultimate goal is to bridge the gap between life and death by eternalizing our digital identity.”
In other words, he is developing digital afterlife technology to enable what he calls augmented eternity (AE). “I” would be a bot based on the data I had produced over my lifetime, such as social media posts, personal e-mails, texts, tweets, Pokémon Go adventures, photos, videos, blogs, articles, and books. I assume recordings of my voice also would contribute to my bot’s artificial life form. All this data would be fed into an artificial neural network. Rahnama estimates that in 50 to 60 years each Millennial will have reached an age where they will have collected zettabytes (1 trillion gigabytes) of data.
Given the growing capabilities of cognitive computing, my bot could learn ad infinitum as new information is sent its way. Continuous learning is why my bot would be able to deliver an up-to-date class on cultural intelligence or any other topic related to the borderless workplace. It would be so much less work than what I do right now to keep up to date.
With my knowledge in digital form, someone would create algorithms to support my bot in answering questions from the living. This is what Rahnama calls a “new form of inter-generational collective intelligence.” I’ve always relied on books—and now the Internet—to connect with thinkers of the past, but now AE will give me access to what those brains might think about current developments.
Instead of an abstract topic such as cultural intelligence, let me relate AE to an actual historical event—the Turkish invasion of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus in 1974. My timing was bad, and I was hitchhiking around the island during those tumultuous days. I left the northern coast of the island on July 15, the same day a coup d’état was carried out by the Cypriot National Guard on the orders of the military Junta in Greece. Having none of this, the Turks invaded on July 20 (using one of the beaches I had been sleeping on). If I had written something about this event or taken pictures, my bot would have a record of my experiences that others could draw upon. Of course, I was not the only witness to the events and the aftermath—ordinary Greek and Turkish Cypriots, soldiers, politicians, and UN observers all would have a perspective. They could become bots and contribute to a much more holistic view of the events, and perhaps offer potential solutions that elude us “live” creatures.
The interface with AE could be in the form of an intuitive and personal chatbot, voice interface, or 3-D virtual avatar. “Tailoring” to the individual user will be essential, and this will draw upon context-aware computing, which the consultancy Gartner defines as:
“A style of computing in which situational and environmental information about people, places, and things is used to anticipate immediate needs and proactively offer enriched, situation-aware and usable content, functions, and experiences.”
My relationships with Alexa and Siri haven’t reached this stage of sophistication yet. But imagine!
Think of “dead” bots collaborating with one another, as well as with live users. There are many brilliant minds of the near past and the soon-to-be-past that could be tapped as digital learning and problem-solving resources for generations to come. Unfortunately, people like Shakespeare and Einstein didn’t generate enough personal data to make reliable predictions about what they might have said or thought if they were still alive. If only Shakespeare had Twitter . . . no, forget that! Let me just know him through his plays, and not what he thinks about every piece of gossip in Elizabethan London.
Is AE feasible? Rahnama says it is technically possible today given low-cost data storage, ubiquitous Internet connections, cheap computing power, and machine learning. Technology is the easy part, he says. For Rahnama, the main stumbling block is data ownership and control, but I’m sure another piece of artificial intelligence will help us navigate through the legalities.
The idea of the Singularity—when humans and machines will merge—has been around for a while, and Ray Kurzweil, its leading proponent, has predicted we will be able to “upload our minds to a computer” by 2045. But I don’t want to just interact with my own mind. What would I learn?
I may not get to chat with Shakespeare about his techniques for writing plays, but I might be able to instant message with Prince about his guitar playing. Apparently, a Russian startup by the name of Luka has created an AI-powered chatbot that pulls data from the musician’s song lyrics and interviews.
What a brave new world for the living and the dead!
P.S.: I apologize if this article is too morbid for you. I blame the eclipse!
Terence Brake is the director of Learning & Innovation, TMA World (http://www.tmaworld.com/training-solutions/), which provides blended learning solutions for developing talent with borderless working capabilities. Brake specializes in the globalization process and organizational design, cross-cultural management, global leadership, transnational teamwork, and the borderless workplace. He has designed, developed, and delivered training programmes for numerous Fortune 500 clients in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Brake is the author of six books on international management, including “Where in the World Is My Team?” (Wiley, 2009) and e-book “The Borderless Workplace.”
