RAF's Stories from the Future - Digital Immortality and Virtual Personas

The Royal Air Force has just released a second edition of their "Stories from the Future" - fiction pieces designed to get people thinking about the future of the Services and Air Defence.

One of the stories, "Heads Together" draws on some of the work we've done for MOD around the concept of virtual personas:

"Diverse viewpoints make for better decisions, so imagine a world where the whole of society engages with Defence through some form of service and the friends that you make there can convene virtually when you need to discuss a problem, whether they now work in Defence, in industry, in academia – or at all. In this tale, we look at how our people might benefit from this in the future"

The question that the story explicitly poses at the end is:

How would you feel about bring perpetuated in virtual form after you had changed jobs, left Defence or even died? Would advice from your virtual self be a liability to your real self?

You can read this, and the other stories at https://www.raf.mod.uk/documents/pdf/stories-from-the-future-second-edition/

Aura Blogpost - "From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife"

David has a blog post on "From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife" on the blog of the new Aura website/service- "designed to help you prepare your memories, important information and connect with loved ones before you die", part of the burgeoning digital afterlife/memorial sector but also looking to open up the conversations ahead of time.

You can read the blog post in full at: https://www.aura.page/articles/from-virtual-personas-to-a-digital-afterlife/

It's also interesting to compare some of the ideas in the post with Channel 4's recent documentary on Peter: The Human Cyborg as there certainly seems to be some common ground worth exploring.

Digital Afterlife book is out!

Maggi's new book on Digital Afterlife is now out. The book delves deeper and wider into the topic of Digital Immortality introduced in our Virtual Humans book, and encompasses a wider range of artefacts and behaviours linked to the broader term of "Digital Afterlife". The book was co-edited by Victoria Mason-Robbie (with whom we've collaborated on other projects), and I have a chapter on the techie side of Digital Immortality, again digging a bit deeper than we could in the original book.

More information on the CRC site, or you can buy from Amazon in the US or UK, and all other good booksellers!

New Book: Digital Afterlife

Maggi Savin-Baden, co-author of Virtual Humans, has a new booking coming out in April on Digital Afterlife, subtitled "Death Matters in a Digital Age". We had a chapter on the topic in Virtual Humans and Maggi found there was so much interest in it (e.g. a recent story on Radio 4's Today programme which had a contribution from Dr Elaine Kasket who spoke at our book launch) that she put a whole book around the wider topic of Digital Afterlife. David has contributed a tech chapter looking more specifically at Virtual Personas within the context of Digital Afterlife/Digital Immortality.

The book is due to be published in April by Taylor and Francis and you can pre-order now.

Korean Virtual Child

Interesting piece on the Today programme this morning about a South Korean woman who has created a virtual copy of her dead child. Shades of Be Right Back, later episodes of Channel 4's Humans and of course presaged in our chapter on Digital Immortality in the book. Dr Elaine Kasket contributed to the BBC discussion and was also one of the speakers at our book launch. You can find several media reports on-line about the story including from the Times and Telegraph.

"The documentary Meeting You has been watched by millions in South Korea. It features Jang Ji-sung putting on a headset and “meeting” her daughter, Na-yeon, who died four years ago at the age of seven. Ms Jang also wore gloves that gave her some sensation of touching her child in a computer-generated park." - The Times

"The digital avatar was created using images collected from a child model and from pictures of Nayeon. The show is designed to give relatives who are grieving the loss of a loved one the chance to say goodbye to a virtual version of their lost family member."

The screengrab video (see Times article) is also very reminiscent of the old Milo demo from Lionhead Studios.

Facebook AI to limit post-death invites

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/09/facebook-to-use-artificial-intelligence-to-stop-telling-users-to-say-hi-to-dead-friends

Digital Immortality and Virtual Humans

A journal paper that Maggi and I wrote last year on Digital Immortality and Virtual Humans and which was published in Postdigital Science and Education (2019) (1:87–103) is now available on-line through the Springer web site on this link.

Abstract

The use of virtual assistants such as Siri that provide voice and conversational interfaces, the growth of machine learning techniques to mine large data sets and the rise in the level of autonomy being given to computer-controlled systems all represent shifts in artificial intelligence that are enhancing the creation of digital immortality. The growth of personality capture and levels of brain simulation as well as computationally inspired life after death may change the future of religion,affect understandings of the afterlife and increase the influence of the dead surviving in society. This paper provides an overview of recent developments in the area of digital immortality, explores how such digital immortals might be created and raises challenging issues. It presents the early findings from a study that created a virtual persona. This prototype system contains relevant memories,knowledge, processes and modelling of an individual’s personality traits, knowledge and experience and, also, incorporates the individual’s subjective and possibly flawed view of reality. It is argued that this system offers the possibility for the development of a persona that learns [and acts] post-death.

Keywords

Digital immortality.Virtual humans. Chatbots. Autonomous agents.Artificial intelligence. Machine learning

Latest Update on Eternime

Latest update on Eternime

http://uk.businessinsider.com/eternime-and-replika-giving-life-to-the-dead-with-new-technology-2018-11?r=US&IR=T

"The beta test has more than 40,000 signups, according to Eternime's website, but is so far only in the hands of around 40 people."

End-of-life chatbot can help you with difficult final decisions

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2147691-end-of-life-chatbot-can-help-you-with-difficult-final-decisions/