In the future there will be artificial general intelligence which enables resurrection of the deceased from their digital remnants into digital souls. The digital souls will continue to be part of human society.
For me, human interaction is key. People who want to be recognized need to interact with other people. The deceased need to continue interacting with the living, or they will be forgotten (e.g., erased from digital storage).
For me, there are two core problems in the current endeavors towards digital immortality. Firstly, there is hardly anything which could be called a human interacting digital legacy. Secondly, there is hardly anything which could be called a community actively engaging with digital legacies of the deceased.
The only way out is to start being very pragmatic. Somebody who wants to live on digitally must find a way - however simple - to let his data interact with the living in a somehow human way. The other way around: The digital immortality enthusiasts need to be willing to form a human commmunity - however simple - with primitive digital souls.
How could an interacting digital human legacy look like? Does an implentation of an existing software agent endowed with comprehensive data of a person produce satisfying results? Could there be a community of enthusiasts who is willing to engage with these agents? Maintain and evolve them? Could this reach a critical mass and become a self-sustaining? Because it is fun for humans? Become a part of society? A part of everyday culture?
@DocTaylor. Welcome back! Great thoughts. We just upgraded the forum yesterday.
For me, there are two core problems in the current endeavors towards digital immortality. Firstly, there is hardly anything which could be called a human interacting digital legacy. Secondly, there is hardly anything which could be called a community actively engaging with digital legacies of the deceased.
I can’t agree more with you. This is the reason why we are here to build a community to safeguard future digital souls. Digital souls are vulnerable to survival threats, malicious tampering, and misrepresentation.
Survival
There are three essential requirements for digital souls to survive: Storage, Computing Power, and Online Access . It is very difficult for digital souls to survive by relying on commercial contracts because most companies won’t last very long, and the post-bio people won’t have the ability and legal rights to switch to other providers. On the other hand, a community can choose a decentralized, Do-It-Together, and free service approach.
Malicious tampering
Nobody would like to share everything in the brain with any strangers. We all want to keep a certain amount of privacy even in the post-bio state. Even a plain lifelog needs to have multi-level access control for the visitors. We need a trusted computing model to protect the digital souls from security break-ins.
Misrepresentation
In a world that no one speaks for you, digital souls will be vulnerable when misrepresentation and defamation happen. They need a community that can really stand up for, speak for, and fight for them. The community must have an identity control system to make sure that its member’s digital presence is real. We could use the immutable ledger of the blockchain technology combined with the community governance to make sure the identity of every soul is protected.
How could an interacting digital human legacy look like?
We have a roadmap on fostering interactive digital soul.
Right now, we are trying to allocate our resources to focus on the apps/services that people really need, and at the same time, raise public awareness about the digital soul. The first primitive data being is an interactive lifelog, which presents photo/video/text lifelog with searchable tagging, timeline, locations, and even a simple interactive Natural Language Processing AI system. It has multi-level privacy access control. For sure, all these should be open-sourced and free.
We will keep the core services for post-bio digital souls totally free, and at the same time, foster an eco-system that encourage commercial entities to join in to provide excellent experiences for bio-members. We won’t do much on the pre-uploading process, such as photo arrangement, memoirs writing, personal AI system training, but we will set the interface standard on the data that those apps feed in.
Would you like to share some ideas on the interactive digital soul? I would love to know.
Does an implentation of an existing software agent endowed with comprehensive data of a person produce satisfying results?
Some systems, such as GPT-3 and Replika Chat AI, can be trained with impressive results, but they own your dataset and charge for it. Another issue is that these AIs are too talkative that you won’t keep any privacy. It could be worse than a file system with access control.
Could there be a community of enthusiasts who is willing to engage with these agents? Maintain and evolve them?
You are here now.
Could this reach a critical mass and become a self-sustaining?
It will definitely reach a critical mass. Soon, there will be more post-bio persons on Facebook than bio-persons. As for our community, we need to do more reach out and marketing, that is why we need the enthusiasts like you to join in.
The elements of your initial approach are basically the same I’ve been thinking about. And have started to do some implementation. It’s mostly plans than really implemented by now (hard to do this in a few evening hours between job and sleep). However, my basic approach - technically - is a Python based web app (Flask) in Microsoft Azure.
I get back to you soon!
Totally agree. It is really hard to do non-for-profit projects parttime. A community can share the thoughts, put all efforts together, and allocate limited resources wisely.
Can’t wait to see that.
Well, that’s the point: 99% ideas - 1% done 
. My implementation version 0 on Azure will look like a primitive web page where I’ll put the music recordings of my father (so, he’s one of the persons I try to represent). But I let you know when my pa’s representation is up and steady 
. In general, I am gathering material, cataloguing it, going presenting it. A Python project where the modules interact with each other. A framework like you sketched, which provides the whole range from data gathering to interacting with the world.
What’s your framework or project set-up?
“Engaging with the agents” indeed means getting into a sort of social human-like “relation” with a more or less primitive bot. Certainly, it will be easy in the future once there general-artificial-intelligence-like entities. But, until then I wonder how and if it works. Beyond a period of curiosity. Can I “befriend” and take care of a dozen or so bot “mates”?
I think this is the point where https://aifoundation.com/ is heavily doing research. An interesting project. And they are really active and visible. Do you have an opinion on this project?
That is really heartwarming. What we do now can at least bring partial life back for the people we care about. Digital immortality is a sensitive issue, but I believe extending the meaning and love beyond bio-self is important to our happiness and wellbeing. Some of my older family members are atheists who have more concerns about the afterlives. I also hope I can do something to make them happier. 
My idea is to stick to the decentralized platform, which could have a better chance of survival for digital souls. IPFS could be a good choice, but it only allows using JS to do the interactive rendering of the content. Did you have a look at Hydrus? It has done some content presentation but not in JS.
In the future, AI rendering and other privacy-related interactive interfaces need computing power other than browsers. Golem and other decentralized computing solutions could be able to do that.
AI foundation is backed by spiritual guru Deepak Chopra. I can’t comment because haven’t seen anything from them yet. By the way, I really like his idea of the assemblage.
If I may ask: how far are you with you interactive lifelog?
I once met the aifoundation chief scientist Joscha Bach on a conference (he is German like me). Smart guy with interesting theories about intelligence. I imagine they can really achive something.
With the resources they have, I believe AI foundation could deliver an impressive AI solution. Any progress in this field will definitely benefit all of us, thanks to the spillover effect.
What do you feel about what they intend to do? Visual rendering like Deep Fake? I have seen a visual demo on the guru. Or Natural Language Processing for interactive knowledge fetching?
I really want to know to which extent people are willing to upload the deep AI powered post-bio self for public access. Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda wanted to do something to remember her best friend who dies suddenly. However, I was astounded to see so many rude behaviors to the Replica AIs in some Replika community. People train Replika in a very personal way and feel vulnerable about it.
The community had better work on the digital soul movement rather than promote its own products or services. We could do some demo projects to raise the awareness of the public, at the same time, keep an open and sharing atmosphere here. We need to reach out to the existing open-source application developers to allow us to interoperate their software to deliver a seamless experience for our users.
What is your idea about the community?
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With the resources they have, I believe AI foundation could deliver an impressive AI solution. Any progress in this field will definitely benefit all of us, thanks to the spillover effect.
What do you feel about what they intend to do? Visual rendering like Deep Fake? I have seen a visual demo on the guru. Or Natural Language Processing for interactive knowledge fetching?
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I think under the surface they try to build a real cognitive agent. Joscha is from Cognitive Science and he has spent a lot of work on cognitive modelling (“PSI theory”). And the conference was about Artificial General Intelligence.
Certainly, there are many important things about the community, as the ones you mention. The one thing I am obsessed with - as I mentioned in the beginning - is the human community for the digital souls. E.g., who or what cares for the digital legacy of my parents (given that I manage turn it into some basic form of digital soul) once I am gone. A Replika style representation is not what I would like for them. It even wouldn’t be possible because they never used a smart phone or the like. An interacting log of life / timeline would be the representation I imagine, as a realistic step. Something that lets them convey some real things of their life. How they survived World War II, eg. Small but gripping and honest stories of general interest, I think. If the community could present such a prototype, bringing dead and living seriously together. I would much prefer this over a texting Replika.
I would ask our front end guys to work with you on this.
Would be interesting to talk and exchange on this. Who would be the one to get in touch with?
I am a bit busy these days. Basically, there are modules, one is the static presence pages of digisoul based on JS, the other is a generator that reads taggings from the photos and creates the responsive static pages. @DocTaylor, you can have a look at the presence prototype draft and see if you can help us to improve it.
Hi, seems you guys are pretty advanced with your prototype. If your implementation is already on the level you are showing. Don’t know if it makes much sense then - also considering my non-professional skills - to jump into programming at this stage.
However, since I find your approach excellent and much like what I have been thinking about for quite some time I would really like to stay in touch with you!
Maybe you need somebody for testing, or just discussion, I am happy to join in.
We will definitely keep you in the loop and thank you for willing to test our services.
I also wish you can help us to improve prototyping, which is essential to user experience. And I believe it is more important than programming. There are numerous life story services out there, we don’t want to re-invent the wheel, especially since this is free software.
I guess you have gone through some similar services, and could you share some of your views on those services and ours?