I can see why they would do it, but I think it is sick and twisted. We already have a loneliness epidemic among the population. We already are shirking our responsibility by building robots to talk to our elders and we already spend too much time looking at screens. It would be better to go and befriend an older person, give them real face to face time with a person and a new friendship, than to talk to an AI replay of something that once was. I think it will lead to more turning inward, more isolation, and less human contact. None of those things are healthy or good. Sure it might help a few people, but I think it will hurt far more; including the young people who miss out on the stories & friendship of those who've lived through so much.
>> implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.<p>I've seen this so many times in science fiction that I am disappointed that MS can claim IP over such a scheme. It is like, after centuries of writers writing about it, applying for a patent on "flying machines". I understand that patent law may in fact protect such things, broad concepts that innumerable people have dreamt about for decades, but it shouldn't. At most it should grant monopoly to a specific implementation rather than sequester the entire field.<p>On the other hand, let MS have it. All that science fiction points to such schemes going either going horribly wrong or being sad and pathetic. Let MS keep shooting that same foot.
This was quite literally an episode of Black Mirror ("Be Right Back" - S2E1)<p>If you haven't tried Microsoft's voice synthesis service, it's incredible so maybe they'll have something here in 10 years.<p>(Scroll down to the demo box) - <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#product-overview" rel="nofollow">https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...</a>
This so reminds me of the Battlestat Galatica prequel Caprica, where Daniel Graystone brings back his dead daughter as a V-space bot, thereby leading to the creation of the first Cylon.<p>I cannot see this as being helpful to the grieving process. I do see it being useful for businesses: create a chat or VR bot of a founder or shrewd executive to tap their take on things on demand. This is similar to the ghost AIs in Cyberpunk 2020, and to the corporate ghosts in the Cat series by Joan D. Vinge.
For anyone looking for it, the following is the only reference to "deceased" in the patent, which is more generally about creating a chatbot imitating a specific person.<p>> For instance, a personalized personality index may comprise social data relating to a deceased relative of a user. Although the social data may comprise information from the lifetime of the deceased relative, the social data may not comprise information related to a time period after the lifetime of the deceased relative. As a result, a set of data acquisition rules may be generated for (or assigned to) the personalized personality index. The set of data acquisition rules may provide instructions for acquiring data related to various time periods of the deceased relative's lifetime (e.g., before, during and/or after the lifetime). Such instruction may include asking a user questions about a time period, one or more events and/or people, or asking a user where such information may be obtained. In such an example, such questions may indicate the specific person represented by the personalized personality index (e.g., the deceased relative) possesses a perceived awareness that he/she is, in fact, deceased.
I keep a lot of digital stuff - photos, writing, files of every description...<p>I’m always in the market for good search tools to run over all that stuff (I currently like Recoll). The ideal tool would be something akin to a virtual museum curator - something that knew all the content of the archive, all the relationships between the content, all the context, the lineage, the referents, and all the implications.<p>“Jeeves, what was the thing I was working on last week? You know, the thing?”<p>Nobody knows all that better than me, as I created and gathered the data in the first place.<p>So is a sufficiently advanced search tool for all that stuff indistinguishable from an AI-of-me?
I purpose the phrase “deceased loved ones” is an editorial spin on the technology that missing Microsoft’s goal. If the goal is to revive a dead mother as a chatbot we can say that has a high probability of landing in the uncanny valley. Perhaps it’s just to train cooperate chatbots to have celebrity personalities, and dead personalities sell for cheaper than live ones do.
It would be heart crushing to miss your loved one, and ask the zombiebot: "Remember what you said when we were in the deck of our honeymoon Baltic cruise, and you held my hand at dawn?"<p><pre><code> "Yes, of course I remember. I also binged for you these great deals on honeymoon Baltic cruises."</code></pre>
I really hope ‘black mirror’ runs with this concept:<p>‘Here is a chatbot of your dead friend, unfortunately he didn’t authorize a paid account, so we have to fund his digital after-life with advertising. This means he will occasionally try to sell goodyear tires to you. Please press accept.’
Don't think dead loved one.<p>Think rather of people whose job it is to talk and interact.<p>College lecturer can keep teaching.<p>From a few hours ago:<p>When your professor is dead, but teaches anyway<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873661" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873661</a>)
Plenty of prior art in SF. Stanislaw Lem's character Ijon Tichy utilizes such invention - Russell, Popper, Feyerabend and even Shakespeare recreated from their collected works as AI packaged into cartridges that you can plug in and have a chat with.
Black Mirror, "Be Right Back", Season 2, Episode 1 [1] has this very plot.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back</a>
We are not far away from the "personal entertainment device" in THX 1138 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn-Sa0MlFkg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn-Sa0MlFkg</a>