

Eterni.me - Become Virtually Immortal - mariusursache
http://eterni.me
A team of engineers, designers and business people at MIT EDP tries to defeat death by preserving your memories into an intelligent avatar, that can interact with your close ones after you pass away.
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adriand
I've had a somewhat similar idea related to storing memories and I suspect
that it's a fairly common idea that's occurred to lots of us.

However, this sounds ridiculous. The worst and most tone deaf example of how
ridiculous this sounds is the part that shows an image of the deceased person
with, "Hello Mike! Remember that time we went fishing?" with a spot for a
reply.

I mean this literally, not rhetorically: who would honestly engage in that
type of "conversation"? If you were someone who truly loved the deceased
person and mourns their loss, I simply can't imagine this "conversation"
taking place, unless you are in a spot of such grief and emotional pain that
you're no longer able to cope and will grasp any straw that is offered. If you
didn't truly love the deceased person, perhaps you would engage this way just
for kicks? But it's still weird.

~~~
frugalfirbolg
Sadly their marketing pitch does not convey an understanding of human
interactions. The example you pointed out is reminiscent of a bad Turing test
chat bot with a lexicon of topics to crawl through.

Still, the ability to dynamically generate a topical chat bot from a corpus of
digital artifacts is interesting. I'm currently envisioning their work as a
natural language parser front end with subject specific response decoration
and a machine learning algorithm to trigger "self-initiated" conversation and
topic selection.

~~~
chadwickthebold
I think their marketing pitch may be reflective of a lack of understanding of
human interaction on the part of the founding team. 5 engineers, a business
exec, and two HR people - but no psychologists or social scientists.

Too much what, not enough why IMO.

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stewdio
Wasn’t this an episode of Black Mirror? In particular this season 2 episode
titled “Be right back”:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-iZTSC9Ml8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-iZTSC9Ml8)

And if you’re not familiar with the series, you really ought to give it a go!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_\(TV_series\))

~~~
parley
I must second this. An excellent series with nice twists and dilemmas!

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Kronopath
This is really unsettling.

When first reading through it I thought it was going to be some kind of
digital journal or time capsule thing, maybe one that has strong guarantees
against data loss.

But then I got to the part about interacting with the virtual you.

They're trying to emulate a person, a (formerly) living, breathing person, by
looking at them from the outside. And then they want to speak for that person.

Am I the only one who's bothered by this? Who finds this disrespectful?
They're trying to emulate you based on the things you share with them,
presumably. But that is a very far cry from preserving the person as a whole,
and presenting it that way is disingenuous. Because you won't be interacting
with that person. That person is gone. You'll be interacting with a crude
facsimile of that person's _branding_.

If I were to have immortality, I'd much rather have it by _not dying_.

~~~
lebek
If chat logs are incorporated into the model the emulation might be quite
realistic, to a point.

~~~
polarix
Better still would be to incorporate the expectations of people who interacted
with the person; unfortunately even the conscious memories of living beings
are currently rather hard to access.

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svankie
Horrifying. This sounds exactly like "Be Right Back"[0] from the Black Mirror
series.

[0]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/)

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chadwickthebold
In the end, you are still dead. Living people interacting with a digital
mishmash of your digital leavings seems both disingenuous and kind of creepy.

~~~
angersock
Achievement unlocked: Dixie Flatline.

Another point for team Gibson.

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chadwickthebold
It gets really scary when you imagine that the path to monetization for this
thing might be advertising. Great, I can remember that fishing trip I took
with grandpa, but he'll be subtlety shilling for some online retailer at the
same time.

~~~
krapp
More likely, appliances and devices will be given personalities and 'avatars'
meant to interact with their owners in a humanlike fashion, both in 'reality'
and online, and these personalities will be subtly tweaked to resemble those
of their relatives, and projected models of the sort of person they might find
attractive.

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squidsoup
If this is satirical, well done - it's both horrifying and hilarious. If not,
please forward my communications to:

    
    
        1A small flax hut
        Adjacent to large boulder shaped like waffle iron 
        Fjordland National Park, New Zealand

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frugalfirbolg
I'd love to see some publications from their R&D to outline how this won't
turn into another one of those chat bot apps that you can have write Facebook
posts in your style based on frequency analysis of your past posts.

~~~
gohrt
You are looking at it backwards....

The "I see dead people" pitch is veneer of scientific respectability, to get
academic funding. Marketing spam is the intended application.

~~~
frugalfirbolg
No doubt it will be used for marketing spam. I can just imagine my digital
ghost telling anecdotes about how in my day and age Intel was a respectable
company and that most of my computers used their CPUs, so my ancestor should
consider them for their computing needs... <sigh> reminds me of a Futurama
episode.

I'd still like to see why they think they can do better than what's already
out there. Especially if they're making a play for academic funding, they need
to publish something.

Note: this comment is without the benefit of searching for each of the team
members prior works; if the company is not pointing to any particular
technique or publication I'm not enthused enough to dig deeper.

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rak
This makes me wonder how far away something like the "Be Right Back" episode
of Black Mirror, as others have already mentioned.

This seems more like another memorial service that may make sense with the
kind of in-roads technology, the Internet, and social media are making into
more and more lives. I think an interesting application of this would be
having QR codes that match up with digital memorials like on headstones, or
in-line akin to a hyper text function in epitaphs.

It's not necessarily something I might want for myself or loved ones, but this
is a fascinating aspect of how people deal with death and a person's digital
life.

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higherpurpose
I hope they intend to collect the data the people are _willingly_ giving to
them, and not just collecting it from the Internet or wherever they find it.

I have no problem with "digital immortality", and I think it can be a good
idea, but only as long as people themselves want it to remain immortal, rather
than being collected NSA-style.

The difference is that you may not want to save all of your sex scandals, and
porn watching habits, forever, but only _certain_ information - like a
biography. That's why it needs to be voluntary, and you need to know exactly
what it is you're giving them to store for you.

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ElliotH
I love how unsettling this is. I'm unconvinced that it will work well, and
doubly unconvinced that anyone will use it, but surely all the most exciting
ideas are ones that scare us a little?

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epenn
I think immortality of any kind is a poor description for what this actually
offers. This seems like a chatbot with a deeper personal context to work with,
which is cool and interesting in and of itself, but not something that would
allow for that grandiose of a description.

A project claiming to offer digital immortality I think would need to offer at
least one of two particular features to live up to that description. (A) It
would have to directly augment the human body to extend its lifetime
indefinitely or (B) it would need to emulate the target human in such a way as
to provide extensional equality. Extensional equality [1] in this context I
think would mean that for any given situation, the human and the emulator
would need to behave equivalently. This automatically entails that it would
need to have the same thoughts, contain the same memories, etc to provide the
necessary context for its decision-making.

Neither (A) or (B) consider any ethical implications of course. I'm just
musing off the top of my head. My point is that although I think eterni.me
could still pan out to be a cool project, it falls short of achieving digital
immortality.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensionality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensionality)

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moocowduckquack
I know that care in spelling is not a good way of judging stuff like this, but
I am not sure I have much faith in their _Artificial Intelligence algorhitms_
(sic).

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sirduncan
Anyone ever see the weird, underrated Robin Williams movie "The Final Cut"?
That was the first thing that came to my mind. Same basic concept

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_30](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_30)

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RyanZAG
Given that this is entirely an AI project - and an amazingly difficult one at
that - the lack of AI researchers in the people section is a huge red flag.
Looks like a VC cash grab more than a real project. Good luck to them,
although I feel sorry for any VC involved.

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swombat
This is mis-pitched in the sense that it shouldn't be pitched at you to have a
conversation with your deceased dad... it should be pitched at you to enable
your great-great-grandchildren to have a conversation with their long-deceased
great-great-grandfather (or -mother).

Even with the limited technology today, with enough material you could create
a passable replica of a person's writing style, stories, opinions, etc. Of
course, that is a very shallow "solution" to death... but it is better than
nothing.

How much would you pay to be able to have this shallow conversation with your
great-great-grandfather?

Considering how much people pay for ancestry research stuff, I'd guess most
people would pay a lot for that.

~~~
tels
( codependent ( target demographic ) wealthy ) ( narcissistic ( target
demographic ) wealthy )

I don't infer predatory intent by the creators, but the above seem far and
away the largest groups of likely customers.

What I imagine would prove more successful due to viral potential while also
being more socially constructive is if the same technology were used to
simulate famous historical figures. Tweet the most poignant quote from your
conversation with Frida Kahlo. Or Dostoyevsky... though that would probably
need to be an FB or blog post.

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adamfeldman
Straight out of Altered Carbon (the Takeshi Kovacs series of novels by Richard
K. Morgan):

"In the novel's somewhat dystopian world, human personalities can be stored
digitally and downloaded into new bodies, called sleeves. Most people have
cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their memories. If their
body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely."
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon))

In addition, the stacks can be hooked up to a rig that allows living people to
interact with the sleeve-less stack in virtual reality (this is also used for
interrogation and torture).

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yarou
Great idea, I've been thinking about a similar system. Wish you the best of
luck Marius, all you'd need now is a human scale robot that can project a
composite image of the deceased, and voila! You've become a digital
necromancer.

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brandynwhite
Exactly like Caprica
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_(TV_series)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_\(TV_series\))

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octaveguin
This seems like it will suffer from a very large uncanny alley of sorts where
photographs and videos don't because they aren't trying to be realistic.

When machine interaction gets 'her'-like, this kind of thing might be
something. Until then, it's just going to be creepy.

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nathan_f77
I don't trust that this company will be alive in 50 years. I wouldn't even
trust Google or Facebook with a task like this. Who can guarantee that any
company will be around in 1,000 years.

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Zikes
So it's a series of cleverbots each seeded by only a single person?

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rmidthun
Once again, Max Headroom proves to be the most prophetic show of the 80s.
"Deities" has a church using exactly this sort of technology to offer
"immortality".

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somewhatjustin
So I would give them some of the things I've created, but it's only accessible
via chat? I'm all for a time capsule, but not in this format.

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aaronem
Well! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who finds this outright horrifying.

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eddywebs
*algorithm is spelled wrong in the index page >> "algorhithms"

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iwasphone
%s/algorhitms/algorithms/g

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CompleteMoron
this is creepy in every way - like the time a friend of mine suggested he
could get rich doing funeral videos the way people pay for wedding videos.

I bet BING buys this to challenge google in AI!

