Digital people also redefine life, especially in the spiritual sense.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “China News Weekly” (ID: Chinanewsweekly), author Zhang Tiankan.
The US “Washington Post” recently reported that 78-year-old spy novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Andrew Kaplan has agreed to become “AndyBot”, a digital person who will live forever on the cloud for hundreds or even thousands of years. . If everything goes according to plan, future generations will be able to interact with him using mobile devices or Amazon’s Alexa and other voice computing platforms, asking him questions and listening to him telling stories. Even after his physical death, he still has valuable advice on his life experience.
Like the Nobel laureate Francis Crick became the first person to sequence his genome in 2005, Kaplan’s behavior also has the first historical significance of eating crabs. He will rewrite the definition of life, and the eternal life of man will be realized to some extent.
Kaplan became a digital person. In essence, it is a virtual person who exists in the network. It uses the network, AI technology, digital assistant equipment and communication dialogue to make a person’s voice and smile can live in cyberspace for a long time. At the same time, it has a sense of real-time and interaction. Kaplan’s eternal life is the eternal existence of consciousness, thought and concept in the cloud, and of course it is different from the actual eternal life. However, this is enough to make people “immortal”. Obviously, such a life is only the life of the soul, but also a permanent heritage of a person.
It is based on this characteristic that many people have signed up and want to join the digital people project of “Eternal Life”. There are many companies involved in such products, one of which is called Eternime. They can turn “the memory, ideas, creations and stories of billions of people” into the digital embodiment of their wisdom and live indefinitely. At present, more than 44,000 people have registered with the company and expressed their willingness to participate in this large and bold attempt.
The original idea of the digital people stems from the HereAfter company co-founded by Talati and Ulahos. Two years ago, Ulahos’s father was suffering from cancer and was about to die. In order to keep his father’s voice and smile forever, he came up with an idea to use AI to let his fatherImmortality in the network. In the last three months of his father’s life, Ulahos recorded his various conversations, stories, and even life scenes with his father. Finally, Ulahos recorded 91,970 words and created a dialogueable AI, Dadbot (literally translated as a father robot, also known as a digital person).
With Dadbot, Ulahos can exchange text and audio information with the computer avatar of his deceased father, talking about his life, listening to songs, chatting and joking. In order to commemorate his father in the circle of friends, Ulahos also uploaded this AI software to social media and spread it widely. To the surprise of Ulahos, he received a number of requests from Urahos to help them create a loved one or their own digital person, and he decided to open up an untapped “digital person” market.
For human beings with flesh and blood, humans have not yet realized very clearly, especially when the field of life science and technology has developed rapidly, people are increasingly aware that life is extremely complicated. To make human beings eternal, it seems almost no possible. Although some people have come up with various methods, such as delaying aging and freezing the flesh so that they can be revived in the future, they are just an idea and a concept, and there is no scientific theory to support and practical operation of the actual technology.
Now, the innovation and exploration of digital people has become a windfall for people to pursue eternal life, which is the inevitable result of the development of modern science and technology. The digital life supported by artificial intelligence and information network technology no longer cares about the flesh, but focuses on preserving and exploring human thoughts and consciousness. It is to put all the experiences and thoughts of a person in his life, including sound, language style and behavior. Modes are preserved and you can interact with people through AI. This is another high-level life.
This kind of advanced life expands the philosophical significance of life in addition to satisfying the love and affection of relatives and friends for the lost relatives. After the death of a person, his soul and consciousness will disappear. In the past, the way to preserve the traces of life is nothing more than images, audio and writings, but with the Internet and AI, the human soul can exist outside the body and the brain, that is, become a digital person.
However, digital people only preserve their thoughts, consciousness, ideas, voices, behaviors and habits during their lifetime. It is impossible to keep up with the times and update. The interaction between people and digital people is actually a kind of past Dialogue, so it is not a real-time conversation in the strict sense.
Even if the first digital person Kaplan, if he talks and interacts with the living person in the future, he will only tell about his past life experience and story, such as he became a war correspondent in his 20s as an Israeli army. The members participated in the third Middle East war, later started a business, became a successful entrepreneur, and later, they played with writing, and were famous for their prolific spy novelists and Hollywood screenwriters.
Evenly, digital people like Kaplan seem to be “blood and flesh”, making people feel authentic andUnlike some other pure digital people, such as AI announcers.
In CCTV’s 6-episode documentary “Innovation China”, the voice of the dying announcer Li Yi was used. This is the dubbing of the AI synthesis, but there is no image of the character. Xinhua News Agency’s first “artificial intelligence presenter” in China adopted a technology similar to that of digital people. The living person was used as a template to imitate Qiu Hao, the host of Xinhua News Agency. From Qiu Hao’s appearance, sound, eyes, and facial movements and lip movements, the similarity between AI (synthetic) anchor and real person Qiu Hao is as high as 99.9%.
However, despite the use of a living person as a template, this AI announcer still reveals an unnatural and dull expression in the broadcast, so many viewers believe that the AI announcer “has no soul.”
However, the AndyBot created through deep learning is based on Kaplan’s appearance, behavior, voice, language, thoughts and consciousness, and can interact with people. Since the digital person is based on all his life experiences, all the language, voice, behavior and thought will make people think that he is the real Kaplan who walked into the network, is a real person, and also has a soul. The same as the living Kaplan. Moreover, people can interact face-to-face with Kaplan, play games with him, order food, ask him to tell a story, learn a language together, play chess and play poker.
In the future, everyone can live forever on the Internet by becoming a digital person. Because such a digital person can interact with a living person, it can also realize and interpret that “death is not really gone, forgetting is eternal demise.” In addition, digital people redefine life, especially in the spiritual sense.