A Fortune 500 company CEO in his 80s is taking part in the MIT trial project, Augmented Eternity and Swappable Identities. The beta MIT project is tested on the digital footprint of 25 volunteers with the goal of creating digital immortal personas. The trial aims to use social media data to train an avatar to behave like the human identity it is connected with. The avatar could share an opinion, his or her likes or dislikes, and create “emotional legacies” for loved ones left behind.
Of the 25, are young people wanting to build a legacy to outlast them, and some terminally ill who want to leave a legacy behind for loved ones. One can also imagine that of the 25, there is an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos individual wanting to Tweet to eternity.
Researcher Hossein Rahnama is leading the MIT Media Lab project and sees the platform as supporting bereavement or as business research and expert knowledge transfer.
Rahnama asks the question, “can software agents become our digital heirs?” And his project works by using a “distributed machine intelligence network” to enable users to control their digital footprint and turn it into their digital persona, which in turn can be shared on social networks.
“What if you could select the digital identity of a deceased person from a social network and activate it as a pluggable ontology into your iPhone’s Siri and ask a question?”
Well, there’s a lot wrong with that question because it omits familiar relationships as well as ethical concerns such as privacy and permission. And will this technology only be rolled out to the business elite? What about a parent or grandparent who has specific historical and cultural knowledge and insight related to, for example, the preparation and cooking of an ancient ethnic dish? Are they not experts?
MIT research is based on “borrowable identities” where users can share a subset of their digitized identity in a social network or a “trust network.” Rahnama sees the project as advancing intelligence.
“The project creates an evolving ontological mapping of an individual based on her digital interactions and allows the person to represent her aggregated knowledge-base in form of a software agent.”
Agents are then rendered as a chatbot or voice assistants, like Siri. Rahnama shares the example of a deceased lawyer who can pass on know-how by colleagues who can “borrow the identity” of the lawyer to hire and consult as a chatbot.
“We believe that by enabling our digital identity to perpetuate, we can significantly contribute to global expertise and enable a new form of an intergenerational collective intelligence.”
Okay, but there are books for those kinds of thinkers — Aristotle, Freud, Marx, etc. And talking about male genius, what systems will be in place so that knowledge exchange reflects the cultural and sex mix of the wider population? Do we really want just the Elon Musks of this world tweeting us from the grave for an eternity?
Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.
