“When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using Artificial Intelligence”

I wanted to bring a perhaps more controversial topic into our BIM blog by discussing the advent of memorial bots and what they could mean for us in the future. The Verge recently featured an article about Eugenia Kuyda and her army of bots at Luka. 

Her company is in the alumni network of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley. Kuyda and her team have developed messenger chatbots to help users with simple tasks such as making weekend plans or finding the right restaurant. When her best friend Roman Mazurenko passed away unexpectedly in a tragic car crash, her friends were contemplating how to best honor Roman’s legacy.

Kuyda convinced friends and family members to do an experiment: They fed several years of text messages into the AI-powered machine on a quest to recreate parts of Roman’s digital identity. His memorial bot was born: an avatar that can mimic the late Mazurenko with surprising accuracy. At the end of this post you can see some text snippets or you can judge for yourself here.  Kuyda herself reflects on this with: “Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? Where is the line? Where are we? It screws with your brain.”

Where are the potential benefits? Aside from the manyfold applications for bots to save us time and effort in our daily lives and businesses, there seem to be some emotional benefits to this, too. Roman’s mother remarked that by chatting with the digital avatar of her late son she could get to know different sides of him posthumously and for that she is very grateful. My question to you is whether this could become the new standard. Since the technological feasibility is out of question – it is already there – we have to ask ourselves whether this is what we want? In an age where more and more people from younger generations feel disconnected from traditional ways to honor the legacy of the deceased, we have the choice to enter a new age in which a part of our digital identity lives on. Forever.

Would be great to hear what you think in the comment section below. Would you use a memorial bot? 

Newsflash: Steven Spielberg is producing a new film adaptation of a novel called “Ready Player One”, set to premiere in 2018. It is based in a dystopian society, around the time 2044, in which the world is in stagnation due to an energy crisis and global warming. Social inequality and economic recession are widespread but there is one escape for most people: OASIS, a virtual world, accessible through a headset and haptic gloves. Its virtual currency is the most stable currency in the world.

A grim scenario. But how will the use of VR play out in our actual future? There are, as always, several possible outcomes. As a BIM aficionado and techno-optimist I wanted to share a more uplifting use case with you today. Let me take you on a trip to the front row of Harvard’s largest and most prestigious on-campus class: “CS50 Computer Science” with 2200 participants and 102 staff.

Harvard just announced their first MOOC that will be VR-ready this fall in order to improve the online learning experience of thousands of students. If leveraged correctly, VR could provide access to the world’s best education from the most remote corners on our planet. Does mere access to the virtual platform however increase the success rate of students in online classrooms? MOOCs have been troubled by low completion rates. According to TechCrunch, “the future of online learning isn’t about accessibility: it’s about taking what we already know works offline and combining it with what you can only do online to create the most engaging experience.”

What remains to be answered are questions related to the fundamental educational experience: Is VR technology the mean to improve it? How can students take notes and retain the knowledge obtained in the VR classrooms? You are invited to share your opinion with me below on how you think this is going to play out.