Immortality? It exists, I’ve seen it, and it has the shape of a chatbot.

ivanpsy (43)in #technology • 6 years ago (edited)

Immortality? It exists, and I have seen it.

Human Beings have always searched for Immortality, and he has found it through its surrogates.
There was a time when being immortal meant that future generations would remember you and your actions.
The best way to gain the eternal life was to do such a memorable action that would leave the mark for centuries to come, and maybe you would have had a beautiful statue, and your name would be spelt out on the annals of your People.
In other contexts, eternal life is the promise of something you are not able to see at the moment, but that, trust us, it’s real, and you will benefit … after your death …
At that point, you can continue your thousand adventures in one of the Afterlives specially set up for you.
Or, if you belonged to another Culture, Immortality would have been a succession of Life experiences, one after the other, until exhaustion, then you would have truly found peace.

The millennia pass by, and man invents Digital, a place where things are destined to stay forever, and it’s possible to create new Life, according to some a surrogate of it, yet still able of making decisions that have influences in the Real World.

We have baptised “Artificial Intelligence”, that draws inspiration from Human Intelligence but that, well, we hope we will be able to build it a little better …

And along with Artificial Intelligence, the chatbots came, a concrete expression of the prodigies of Technology.

Chatbots have a feature that makes them special: they dialogue with people interacting with them, and they must be taught.
Whoever codes a chatbot inserts the possible answers to possible user questions and, in more sophisticated cases, inserts some Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Natural Language Understanding algorithms, both properly instructed about the way they interact with people.
They are taught a behavioural model.
Yes: just like Human Beings, who learn patterns of behaviour and interaction.

From here to becoming immortal, it’s just a matter of minutes: you simply recreate a chatbot that has a behavioural pattern that is identical to yours, and it’s you, but in the virtual world.

Because the chatbot has your own behavioural
model, it is able to make the same decisions you would take.
Not only: whoever interacts with your chatbot has the perception of chatting with you.
But where to take your behaviour model?
Simple: from the fingerprints that you leave on the web.
Get a Tone Analysis and Sentiment Analysis algorithm, so you can extract communication patterns from a text, and feed all of your contributions to the Social Network.

Once you’ve extrapolated the behaviour pattern, transfer this schema to a chatbot, which you can even call with your name, and the game is done.

If all this seems primitive, then think about the computers of the 1980’s: would you ever say, looking at the screen of a PC in CGA, that we would have come to masterpieces like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto?

So be patient, because adding to this System an Artificial Intelligence that can take decisions reflecting your behaviour pattern is a fast move.
And if all this seems too “virtual” and evanescent, keep an eye out of how social robots are evolving, which will inevitably need behaviour patterns to be able to act in the world.
And that behavioural model might just be yours: your Persona will be an algorithm that you can upload, download and transfer to the machine to your liking.