Kitchen Table Kibitzing 11/19/22: Bring out your dead! - Daily Kos

In the latest example of technology progressing far faster than humans are possibly equipped to deal with, scientists and technical experts have begun taking steps to reanimate the deceased through AI (artificial intelligence) chat bots and virtual images, potentially opening the door to realistic and productive conversations between ourselves and the dead, be they dead loved ones, dead acquaintances, or even dead historical figures.
As reported by Caren Chesler, for the Washington Post:

People have always craved post-death contact with their loved ones. Efforts to remain in touch with the dead have existed for eons, such as photographing deceased children, holding seances and even keeping a corpse in the house for posterity. But artificial intelligence and virtual reality, along with other technological advances, have taken us a huge step closer to bringing the dead back to life.
Disclaimer: I’ve always favored the “keeping a corpse in the house,” method, but I acknowledge times can change, and we should all be open to new ideas.

For instance, Hossein Rahnama, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and a research affiliate with MIT Media Lab, has been building a platform called Augmented Eternity, which allows someone to create a digital persona from a dead person’s photos, texts, emails, social media posts, public statements and blog entries that will be able to interact with relatives and others.
Obviously, if there is no online presence to be swept up into the AI’s re-created consciousness, your ability to communicate with dead relatives, for example, will be limited. I would be unable to have a productive discussion with my deceased great-grandmother, for example, that goes beyond what few Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower tracts from her late 70’s time frame are currently posted online (talking with a reasonable verbal facsimile of my deceased grandmother would be easier, as Marx’s Communist Manifesto is widely available; even so, I suspect the visual images would be rather static as she was a latecomer to Facebook).
As for me, I have a vast pile of journals that I will be able to have to input online (I’ll get on that right away, I promise) to recreate a reasonable facsimile of my verbal and mental self. But predominantly this will be a joy experienced beginning with Millennials and Generation Z, as AI in its current state generally relies on “scraping” existing data off the web or otherwise transcribed on the web or through personal efforts from archived materials. 

But, as implied above, this technology goes well beyond interacting with chat-bots, which already (as you read this) are going the way of the flip-phone. Soon you will be able to access a realistic, animated visual image of your preferred deceased conversation partner, who you may even be able to interact with in a virtual reality environment.







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