Swedish specialists are working on creating "electronic copies" of deceased people. At first, these will be just programs, but in the future, robots visually similar to the dead may be created.
The topic of creating electronic copies of people is very actively exploited by modern mass culture. Something similar we, in particular, could see in the science fiction series "Black Mirror". Partial transfer of the concept to the real world became possible due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and, in particular, neural network technology. Swedish inventors decided to take advantage of the achievements of progress - and the publication Dagen drew attention to this.
“We originally created a speech program that answers our clients' questions about funeral arrangements,” Charlotte Runius, director of the Phoenix network of Stockholm funeral homes, told the publication. Subsequently, the idea appeared to create an "electronic copy of a person." This is a special program that will simulate the voice of the deceased. According to the idea, she will be able to answer various everyday questions, but she will not be able to tell about anything fundamentally new, for example, about new films. At this stage, there is no system for updating the database.
Meanwhile, it is difficult to blame the Swedish specialists for the lack of ambition: according to the plans, the program will become only the first stage of the project. In the future, it is planned to develop robots that will visually resemble dead people.
So far, the entire project is at an early stage. For the first working samples, the funeral agency and a group of programmers intend to find ten volunteers whose voices will be recorded and processed by a special program. It is obvious that only after analyzing the sound of the voices reproduced directly by the AI, it will be possible to conclude that the concept is viable.
Despite the rapid development of artificial intelligence, there may be enough problems in the way of Swedish specialists. Here you can recall the recent disastrous interview with a Chinese female robot. The realistic humanoid Jia Jia simply could not answer the questions posed in any way. The robot found it difficult to name the exact number of letters in the English alphabet. And conversations about artificial intelligence ended in an incoherent stream of words. At the same time, the famous voice assistants Alexa and Siri can solve their immediate tasks quite well, and the experience gained can be taken into account in the future by other specialists.
Ilya Vedmedenko
