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By Root 1119 0

the test. Turing proposed typewritten exchanges; we can update that to computer chat without changing the essence of the test. Thus, we can have a cyber-twin test: You chat with someone and his cyber twin. If you can’t tell the difference, then the machine passes the test. Note that the cyber twin could have a much better memory than the human did; it should be taught to forget in a similar way to the human for real simulation. But it should remember when we really want the answer! As I write, there is a fair bit of work remaining before any cyber twin could pass the test, but substantial progress seems likely.

I see four steps in the progression of digital immortality. First is digitizing the legacy media one has. Second is supplementing one’s e-memories with new digital sources. The third is two-way immortality—the ability to actually interact with an avatar that responds just like you would. The fourth is an avatar that learns and changes over time just as you would have.

Having an avatar that actually learns and grows over time is a much more speculative idea. Who’s to say that it is working correctly? If we could predict how someone would behave after death, then we could predict people during life—an idea that sounds far-fetched. Perhaps a more realistic goal would be to shoot not for growth—as in change—but just accumulated knowledge, so the machine would recall when it last communicated with you and what was said: “Hi Gordon. I talked to you yesterday. You told me about your vacation.”

While I believe the fourth step will remain science fiction, an avatar passing the cyber-twin test is not. A lot of sci-fi and artificial intelligence discussion is about true machine intelligence, where programs actually learn and grow. Personally, the more I learn about machine intelligence, the more I am impressed with the learning ability of the average two-year-old. True machine intelligence remains elusive. Computers can beat human chess masters now, but the computer’s greatest advantage is its ability to enumerate each and every possible move and outcome; most of us would call that tediously mindless, not intelligent. Similarly, in an attempt to answer factual questions like “What year was Abra ham Lincoln assassinated?” brute-force approaches that just scan many encyclopedias and newspaper sources looking for common words often do as well as or better than programs that attempt to parse and comprehend the same texts. I am confident about avatars passing the cyber-twin test because I see that lifelogs will contain enough information to support such brute-force approaches. No sci-fi, truly intelligent machines are required.

By carefully mining your lifelog, we should be able to ask your e-memories questions and hear your answers. We can change the game from a search to a discussion.

Humans have a natural propensity for recording life. Just look at all the people walking around with cameras and video cams. You’d be hard-pressed to find a home without photo albums, home movies, scrapbooks, and mementos. The one thing many people would be sure to rescue from the flames of a burning home would be their photo albums. We love to reminisce, and if you think of all the photos and home movies taken, it seems we enjoy enhanced reminiscence: not just remembering but also hearing and seeing recordings or artifacts from the past. A few of us go beyond just confining ourselves to recordings and objects, and actually edit movies, or create scrapbooks with captions and artistic layout. Some even take classes from companies like Creative Memories to learn to do it better. The rest of us envy them the time and talent to produce such compelling stories.

Your e-memories will prepare you for the digital afterlife. Already, for a fee, Web sites like www.legacy.com and www.forevernetwork.com offer to store letters, essays, photos, videos, and stories to pass on to future generations. Famento.com helps people share family stories, building e-memorials to loved ones. These sites are the digital equivalents of cemeteries and libraries.

Imagine