image is by geralt of pixabay.com
The fictional series, Babel Rising, written in the period 1998-1999, breathes of technologies that, at the turn of the century, were just about emerging. By now, in 2018, a lot of these technologies are almost ubiquitous already: large-screen video walls, Internet-enabled smart ovens & refrigerators (just attend consumer electronics shows where leading developers the likes of Samsung, LG, Apple, Google present their latest wares to find out what’s out there already on the Internet of Things); intelligent personal assistants (such as the Alexa app), artificial intelligence (AI) content writers, poet-bots, chat-bots…
Some of these technologies are already mature, like video walls, but can always be developed further to extend their capabilities (think of 3-D scanning/printing enabling the transmission of solid objects over great distances in almost real time during teleconferences); others remain more of a promise for now, with some of their building blocks still being made to talk and collaborate with each other in deep-learning training and test laboratories, but nevertheless already available in basic bits and pieces in the market (ie, Google Glass for example has the potential to capture everything one sees, and send them all to a deep-learning repository to help build your digital identity; your smartphone already possesses the ability to record and archive all of your auditory input/output traffic, but I am getting ahead). These technologies are here already, and they are leading us through uncharted territories to a more interesting future.
In any case, let us cut to the chase, and focus on the one technology that Babel Rising is mainly all about: the promise of AI as represented by the character Hans.
Could the Hans character really be an AI or just a human behind a false identity (similar to that celebrated Santiago Swallow identity, perhaps)?
With the way identity thefts, false accounts and fake news have become a major pressing issue of the Internet landscape and the new media now, giving rise to so-called social media influencers, hackers and even trolls impacting societies in ways that could even lead to life/death situations on a massive scale, you can be excused for thinking that the Hans interlocutor could well be a human with a stolen or fake identity.
But let’s look at the possibility that Hans is AI: could an artificial intelligence take over the identity of a real human being after his death, thus augmenting the existence of the human being in cyberspace? National Geographic, in a very engaging docudrama series “Year Million”, advances that not only would such a creature be able to exist in cyberspace, it will moreso be able to coexist with humans in the real world, even merging physically with humans to form an intelligent android / superhuman species in an eventual technological singularity.
Still stuff of the future, you might say, but what about now?
Below is an intriguing write-up by Adrienne Matei on the emerging ‘augmented eternity’ of digital identities and existence:
The Emerging Augmented Eternity
New technology is forcing us to confront the ethics of bringing people back from the dead
“…The possibility of digitally interacting with someone from beyond the grave is no longer the stuff of science fiction. The technology to create convincing digital surrogates of the dead is here, and it’s rapidly evolving, with researchers predicting its mainstream viability within a decade …” — read more here from Adrienne Matei’s engaging article at qz.com
Notes:
Many of the links embedded here go to the Wikipedia site. They are provided mainly as starting points for those who would like to explore these topics in more depth.
Some of the linked articles are, by their nature, quite long and will require serious reading to digest, but nevertheless, they make for engaging reading, and for the most part, are understandable to the layman.
— SSJ, 16 March 2018
Related materials:
Here are the links again. I hope you take the time to explore them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass
How to become Internet Famous for $68
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hackers-attack-ukraine/
Digital Immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Adrienne Matei’s Augmented Eternity – Digital Afterlives
Fascinating stuff, Said. 😃 Have to admit I’m still in two minds about what might be possible, at least in the mid-term. A realistic simulation of a person I think is complicated. For me, to simulate the mind, a simulation of the body is also needed because they are so tightly bound, and for a simulation at depth of a person at a given age, it isn’t easy, it needs to be much more than simple imitation. Maybe, it’s just that what I see today is a long way off. Anyway, as usual, certainly food for thought…
Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Steve. Much of the progress of AI now comes from so-called deep learning techniques as applied to artificial neural networks (ANN). Presently, these self-learning ANNs are the closest thing that developers can get near to replicating the human mind digitally. If the ANN remains mediocre, it will not succeed in the simulation of the person. However, if the ANN becomes sharp enough to succeed, do you think it will stop at simply being that person’s replica? So yes, a realistic AI simulation of a person is indeed complicated, and can be very disquieting — the kind of stuff that could have haunted the nightmares of Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking 🙂
I agree, especially when you realize that it is our higher brain functions that make us truly moral, humane and compassionate beings. Hope Microsoft doesn’t work on that part. 😄
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