Startup Out of MIT Promises Digital Afterlife — Just Hand Over Your Data 241
v3rgEz writes "A new startup out of MIT offers early adopters a chance at the afterlife, of sorts: It promises to build an AI representation of the dearly departed based on chat logs, email, Facebook, and other digital exhaust generated over the years. "Eterni.me generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends after you pass away," the team promises. But can a chat bot plus big data really produce anything beyond a creepy, awkward facsimile?"
Re:All of this has happened before... (Score:5, Informative)
Just like the Vu-Age church! (Score:3, Informative)
From the Max Headroom episode Deities [youtube.com].
"Black Mirror" episode (Score:5, Informative)
This is the basis of S02E01 of "Black Mirror"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
The episode did a pretty good representation of the idea, showing things that the the dearly departed's avatar would know and not know based on their chat and email history.
Caprica (Score:4, Informative)
Entire series.
Re:Of course it can! (Score:2, Informative)
Of course it can! Why the resistance? Human-level AI will exist by the time young people reading this are dead. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future was, more or less, right.
How ironic that you should mention Max Headroom. Perhaps you forgot though that the episode where a company was doing exactly this was just a scam? They just used the deceased's image and had it parroting some phrases, essentially a really bad chat-bot, whereas they were advertising that they had made a perfect copy of them and were keeping them "alive" for a price.
btw: The Max Headroom AI was created by accident. The scientists at that time did not know how to make that level of AI on demand.