Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [64]
A complete lifelog is an awesome prospect. Passing on your e-memories might be seen as a sort of one-way immortality, allowing you to communicate to the future. But Jim Gray and I used to speculate about the possibility of something really worth calling digital immortality, where a digital version of yourself lives on and interacts with posterity. What if, a hundred years from now, your heirs could ask you questions and you could answer?
You might be familiar with the word avatar, meaning an image or computer-generated character that represents someone in cyberspace. An avatar might be a picture of you that appears while you instant message with someone. Or, it may be a three-dimensional character in a virtual-reality program like Second Life. Someday, those who lifelog will be able to create avatars that do an amazing job of impersonating them.
Imagine if you could have a conversation with an avatar of your great-grandfather, seeing his face, hearing his voice, and having your questions answered in your great-grandfather’s unique turn of phrase. It seems clear that at least some aspects of your person can be expressed as a program that actually interacts with future generations. Lifelogging is the key.
Your lifelog will have all the details of how you sound, the phrases you employ, questions you have answered, and facts about your life. It will contain recordings of you under stress and relaxed, pleased and annoyed, in triumph and in defeat. It will know your favorite quips and mottos. It will have pictures of you that can be overlaid on a three-dimensional model. If someone should want to impersonate you, your lifelog will be the ultimate gold mine.
There has already been some progress making avatars that answer as the individual would have. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have created a program that lets you interview Albert Einstein. I’ve invested in a company called MyCyberTwin, whose software trains an instant messenger (IM) avatar how to answer as you would. You just give it content from your own IM conversations, e-mail, blog, et cetera, and it learns how to imitate you—it becomes your “cyber twin.”
MyCyberTwin analyzed transcripts of the television show The Simpsons to create a cyber twin for Bart Simpson, who had the following chat with me:
You: What’s up?
Bart: Well, I was interested in getting the fire hydrants from the school to power my downhill racer—wanna help me?
You: No. How is Lisa?
Bart: She can be so annoying, but she is still pretty cool. Do you like my Mom’s hair?
You: Blue hair is pretty cool too. What do you think of your dad?
Bart: My dad, Homer . . . he got a chess set once, then packed it away. When I asked him why, he said he is saving it for a brainy day.
Have you been married to my aunt Selma?
You: No. How old are you?
Bart: I’m ten, man. Best age in the world: You can do what you want without getting in too much trouble.
You: What do you want to do when you grow up?
Bart: It’s always important to consider the consequences of anything you do.
Are you a friend of Principal Skinner, by any chance?
You: Do you have a pet?
Bart: Who needs pets when I have Homer? Actually, I do have Santa’s Little Helper too. He’s a dog. What pets do you have?
MyCyberTwin specializes in creating chat avatars to perform customer service, for example, answering questions for bank customers. Their avatars have gotten better scores than humans in accuracy, sales performance, and customer satisfaction. Now the MyCyberTwin folks are intrigued by the idea of taking my own e-memories as input—there is enough of what I have said in e-mail, letters, chat, papers, and so forth, that one ought to be able to construct a pretty realistic Gordon Bell cyber twin.
Alan Turing, a founding father of computer science, proposed the Turing test for determining a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence: A human judge has a conversation with a human and a machine, each of which tries to appear human. If the judge can’t tell which one is human, then the machine has passed