Greetings from the Beyond: How Digitally Revitalizing the Dead Can Turn Our World

Hollywood has long learned to "revive" actors, and deceased musicians can now appear in front of the audience in the form of a hologram. Microsoft recently received a patent for an interactive chatbot capable of plausible dialogue on behalf of anyone, including a deceased person. Does this mean that soon humanity will be able to gain "digital immortality"? Why some are attracted by this idea, while others are scared, the publication found out with the BBC.

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Greetings from the other world

When American star Kim Kardashian celebrated her 2020th birthday on a small private island in October 40, the most striking and discussed among the many congratulations was the speech of her father Robert. “Happy birthday, Kimberly! - he began appearing on stage from the darkness before the spotlights illuminated his face. - Just look at you, you are already 40 years old! She’s become quite an adult, but she’s still just as beautiful as she was as a little girl.”

It would seem a usual congratulation, if not for one "but".

The fact is that the real father of the star could not attend her 40th birthday in any way. In 2003, he died of esophageal cancer. Guests who did not know about such a gift were a little shocked.

“I’m watching your life,” Father Kim continued in the meantime. “Every day I watch you, your sisters and brother, your children. Sometimes I even give signs so you know I’m nearby.”

Kim was delighted with the gift and even posted the video on Twitter.

“Kanye gave me the most touching gift of my life for my birthday. A real surprise from paradise. Hologram of my dad. He looks so real. We watched the recording over and over again - and we were overwhelmed with emotions,” the star wrote.

However, not all users supported Kim - some wrote that this was a strange gift that made them shiver.

But this was not the first such "appearance" of the dead. Back in 2012, rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, "performed" at the Coachella Music Festival in California.

Having performed two songs from the stage, the hologram flashed brightly for a moment - and disappeared into thin air right in front of the stunned spectators.

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No less sensational was the appearance on stage of Michael Jackson - five years after the singer’s death. In May 2014, its digital copy triumphantly performed at the Billboard Music Award ceremony.

Since then, actors, musicians and other show business figures regularly "return from the underworld" to perform in a grand show, record another video or even act in a movie.

Doubles

In 2011, the whole world saw the science fiction series Black Mirror. Its action takes place in the future. The series reveals the possible prospects for the development of existing technologies and the enormous destructive potential that they carry for human relations.

One of the episodes of the second season, entitled "I'll Be Back Soon," tells the story of a young couple: Ash and Martha move to a new house to start a new life there. However, literally the next day, while returning the rented van, Ash dies in a road accident. And soon after the funeral (according to all the laws of the genre) Marta learns that she is expecting a child from him.

She is so eager to tell Ash about her pregnancy that she decides to use the services of a strange company that promises to give her the opportunity to talk to her dead lover using artificial intelligence (AI). Having fed the smart program all existing videos of Ash and providing full access to his correspondence on social networks, Martha receives a digital copy of him - a chatbot.

The virtual interlocutor with whom she first corresponds and then calls up is practically indistinguishable from the real Ash. He speaks in the same voice, uses the same phrases and even says some kind of "internal" jokes that only two of them understand. However, the end of the series is far from being as optimistic as one might expect.

And although this is just a TV series, it is clear that the creation of such technology was not far off.

In December last year, Microsoft received a patent for "Creating an Interactive Chatbot for a Specific Person", which in theory opens up the possibility of ordering your own Ash for anyone.

To create a digital copy of any person (dead or alive), you need to let the neural network analyze his database: photographs, posts on social networks, personal correspondence - the more, the better. It’s very good if audio recordings are preserved - then the avatar will be able not only to correspond, but also to talk.

Oddly enough, the video is far from so fundamental: artificial intelligence has already learned quite well how to animate and quite believably color even very old black and white photographs.

Sinister Fantasy Valley

The news that the company had received a patent for such a technology caused a mixed public reaction. Basically, the discussion boiled down to listing the ethical problems that can arise as a result of such pseudo-reincarnation.

Some recalled the sad story from "Black Mirror" and predicted the coming apocalypse of any social connections. Others expressed doubts about the real possibilities of the technology, reminding that most of us behave on the Internet in a different way (or even not at all!) As in real life. Consequently, a digital copy of a person, created in the image and likeness of his Internet correspondence, will not have too much in common with the original.

However, reading the comments, it becomes obvious that for many the topic of “digital resurrection” turned out to be very painful - and, according to scientists, this is not at all surprising.

“Everything new comes as a shock, especially if we are talking about a fundamentally new media technology that requires us to reorient ourselves in some way. And even more so when they start using it on dead people,” explains John Troyer, who heads an interdisciplinary center at the University of Bath that studies the phenomenon of death.

Likewise, he said, people reacted to the first photographs of dead people. And already at the end of the XNUMXth century, photos with the dead, even with dead children, became fashionable.

In the end, the expert reflects, people have always tried to preserve the memory of deceased loved ones for as long as possible: first, letters and diaries were replaced by photographs, then videos, and now a chatbot.

According to Dr. Troyer, all this fits well with the theory of “ongoing connections”, which was put forward in the mid-1990s by American psychologist Dennis Glass. After the death of a loved one, our connection with him does not end instantly, but continues - as long as we remember him. That is why many people, when they come to a cemetery, talk with relatives who have passed on to another world, and sometimes even feel their presence.

But it is worth noting that an interactive digital twin will be fundamentally different from the same photograph: it is capable of not only listening, but also responding and maintaining a dialogue. On the other hand, as John Troyer reminds, a conversation with a chatbot can only be called a dialogue with a great stretch: “Can such communication be considered a conversation with the deceased? No you can not. This is just a kind of agreement, an agreement with ourselves - we perceive this communication as if this is that very person.”

The emerging feeling of disgust or dislike and goosebumps that periodically run through our skin, scientists called the "effect of the ominous valley."

“This is when a robotic hologram or digital double already closely resembles an ordinary living person, but still not so much that the differences are not obvious,” explains Troyer. “As a result, these differences instantly attract attention - they are striking and cause in us a persistent reaction of rejection, disgust, even fear. The latter, by the way, is actively used by horror film directors.”

Drive the genie into a bottle

Many even suggested introducing an official ban on the creation of interactive chatbots of deceased people.

However, Lillian Edwards, a professor of Internet law at the University of Newcastle, doubts that such a ban is in principle possible. And it's not even about the patent. The very fact of the existence of a new technology (that is, the possibility of creating interactive chatbots) means that the genie has already been released from the bottle.

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All its constituent elements (like video editors or a speech synthesizer) are easily accessible, and most of them have a lot of other uses, since they were originally developed for something else - what exactly to prohibit and how.

“Then the use of special effects in films should also be banned? - Professor Edwards reflects. — Voice assistants like Siri or Alexa. Or technologies for “revitalizing” old photographs? So people will be outraged - they will say that this limits their freedom of expression. And they will be right!”

The effectiveness of such bans is also highly questionable, the expert is convinced, and it is almost impossible to control their observance. After all, when a person is driven by the bitterness of loss, he often turns out to be deaf to the voice of reason.

This, according to Professor Edwards, is the main danger of the new technology. People who have just experienced the loss of a loved one have a rather limited ability to think rationally. And this makes them very vulnerable and easily manipulated.

“Fast food is advertised to children by characters from their favorite cartoons, because such advertising is the most effective,” she explains. “Now imagine that someone close to you recently died, and the creation of a digital copy of him was partially paid for, say, by a travel company. After all, advertisers know: there is no more effective way to sell you a trip than if this avatar says: “Do you remember how we went to Greece - what a wonderful vacation it was!”

My dust will survive and perish

However, opponents of the technology have nothing to fear yet, Tim O'Brian, who is responsible for AI programs at Microsoft, said that the company has no plans for its development yet.

But Microsoft is far from the only company that develops such technologies. There is a lot of work going on around the world to create digital copies of living people - and, according to O'Brien, there are at least two examples of its very successful application: "mainly because they are controlled and do not allow anyone to do what they want." as you please.”

The first of these is a project of the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by director Steven Spielberg. Since there are fewer and fewer people who survived the genocide of World War II every year, for several years now the foundation has been recording and digitizing the stories of eyewitnesses of the tragedy, preserving them in the form of interactive holograms that are not afraid of old age. In a sense, survivors of the genocide are being turned into museum exhibits, ready to answer questions from visitors.

Of course, there are many archival records of concentration camp survivors. However, there is a big difference between watching a regular video and talking to the person on the screen one on one - especially if you know that he is no longer alive.

The second example is the StoryFile platform, which helps create digital doubles of famous people, of course, with their consent and with their help.

The technology and algorithm of artificial intelligence in both cases are almost identical. The main difference is that this project is commercial, so almost anyone can order their digital copy. For NASA, for example, they made an avatar of an astronaut that can appear on a smartphone screen and answer questions asked about space.

In both cases, AI does not create anything new. The program simply analyzes the question asked, catches the keywords and finds the one that suits the most among the many pre-recorded options.

However, from the outside, for the person who asked the question, this is really the most similar to an ordinary dialogue with someone who is no longer alive.

Relocating souls in the digital age

Stephen Cave, head of the University of Cambridge's Center for the Study of Artificial Intelligence, says the technology was inevitable.

From time immemorial, people have made attempts to save themselves and their loved ones from death by adapting the same uncomplicated methods to modern realities.

In the scientific age, belief in the magic elixir of youth was replaced by the hope that someday scientists will still be able to find a cure for old age, and the physical resurrection from the dead was embodied in the technology of cryogenic freezing of the body until better times.

Likewise, the idea of ​​digital immortality is just another version of the myth of reincarnation, the transmigration of souls. Only retold - in accordance with the demands of the time, in a scientific way.

“The idea of ​​the soul is that some core, the essence of personality, can be separated from a person’s physical body - and it is able to survive his physical death,” explains the scientist. “The idea of ​​digital immortality plays precisely on these hopes. That the real me is not my body. This is data, information that can be separated from the body and stored in some other form.”

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However, this sensation is deceiving, Dr. Cave warns. By no means should one think that the digital twin can really bring back the past.

“Technology promises things it simply cannot deliver. “In my opinion, she is not able to give us anything similar to the communication that we had with our loved ones while they were alive,” he is sure. - The deceased certainly does not come to life. Any chatbot or digital copy is not an extension of a person. It is, at best, a faint echo of it.”

Exactly the same, according to the scientist, needs to be borne in mind by people who hope to defeat death by creating their own digital copy.

“If you want to live on (in the sense of somehow experiencing the world around you), then “life” in the form of a set of tweets is unlikely to give you such an opportunity, right? — the expert notes skeptically. “The existence we are accustomed to will in any case end with our biological death.”

On the question of whether "digital resurrection" will become more real in the future, Dr. Cave can not unequivocally answer.

“Will we ever be able to reconstruct a person's identity from their digital footprint using computer technology? Perhaps... Perhaps someday we will. But so far we are still very, very far from this,” the scientist sums up.

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