Facebook has decided to treat the dead differently at last, so breaking through the old problem that, just as on the web you couldnt tell someone was a dog–as in the famous New Yorker cartoon–similarly you couldnt tell they were dead. Facebook now proposes to “freeze” and “memorialise” he sites of those who someone officially declares to be dead—though quite how you get a death certificate to Facebook isnt yet clear. Someone blogged somewhere recently that “if he didnt hear from his friends every hour he assumed they were dead”. Hopefully, it wont come to that!
The Facebook proposal is that only friends you have accepted before death will be able to find your “frozen” site, see it and add tributes to it. That seems a bit strong: after all, many others might care to jojn in a tribute after your death who didnt happen to have been your friend on Facebook in life–perhaps you relatives or children? Is there any more reason to fear malicious postings by those who know you already, as opposed to those who dont? In any case, it wouldnt be hard to have a truster “executor” or “Facebook filterer” who removed any malicious postings—such people could be appointed in wills in the future, as literary executors are now. The tricky bit will be using “defriend” to rid yourself of a growing list of dead friends—–but the huge mass of young users dont need to think about that just yet.
Bill Dutton talking to the Forum’s news unit is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il_Ag0yVFXg
Today’s papers report a new method being trialed from the US to get news into countries with heavily censored Internet access such as China and Iran. (see:
http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/01/using-email-tricks-to-get-news-into-countries-that-censor-it/)
The method is called FOE (Feed Over Email) and is essentially a method for sending encrypted email as an RSS feed to any email address that requests it from an external mail provider such as hotmail or gmail. There are many such providers and it is hard for any state system to block all of them.
When decrypted the news appears in mail as HTML rather than text, rather like the adverts you get now from Amazon and British Airways. It all looks interesting and the wonder is why you need to request it at all: it could be sent as government-originated spam to any address they can find in a target country, just lie real spam! This would lower the likelihood of Government agencies at the target end later finding ways of locating those who had requested the feed. Companies in Western countries have not been slow to sell relevant software to the Iranian Government for Internet censorship, so why would they not take the next step and sell what is needed to find the FOE requestors? (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html)
As with all good ideas there are down sides: there are now HTML mailers available to anyone that send you not text but an image you cannot copy/paste or save; these give the sender the ability to delete email received by you from them, or alter it later as they wish; they own their own email, not you the receiver. Worse, it lets the sender know exactly when you read their email and where, and you can avoid it only by turning off the receipt of all HTML emails.
This tool, in the hands of the “target” Government’s, would be a powerful antidote to Western Government-backed “spam” emails. It’s all a question of who is moving quicker, the cat or the mouse. The hidden paradox is the use by Western Governments for virtuous purposes of all kinds of tools, from anonymizers to spam, that they deplore when used on them!
Recent proposals to consider Google or Microsoft as possible holders of citizens’ health records produced a predictable range of comments in the Times blog: from “yes, yes, anything to get away from another centralized state database” to “Ah ha, there are the Tories handing over public money to a company they are connected to, and which is not even British”.
Behind the games are very serious issues, some of them technical, most not. Even among those who agree that the NHS IT policy over the years has been an unmitigated disaster, some think Britain should now stick with the long term database plan because of the investment made and that it will eventually be delivered, however late and however much over budget. It is good to remember here that the NHS took decades to provide email to staff, because a special NHS-relevant email system had to be designed and implemented, even though off-the-shelf email from any supplier could have been provided to the whole system within weeks or months, as it was to virtually all companies. Who could possibly have believed there was special NHS email? I personally gave up on NHS administration when I heard they had simply failed to claim the Microsoft discount, for quantity of installations, of £50 million to which they were entitled! These failings are not casual but endemic, as everyone can now see after the huge fall in NHS productivity since Gordon Brown doubled its tax-take.
All that health records require is:
* reasonable levels of reliability and confidentiality
* access by the “owner” of the records and some recourse in case of error
* ease of updating the records by those entitled to do so
* access anywhere to the records, preferably world-wide
If this list has a certain familiarity, it is because many kinds of big companies now offer this kind of service to anyone and compete for their custom: banks are the obvious case. Your access to your financial records can be from an ATM anywhere in the world, is up to date, pretty reliable and you more or less trust the bank to keep your records safe and confidential, probably more than you trust civil servants who leave data sticks regularly in taxis. Vodafone, which is British like most of the banks, also offers customers large scale mail storage, which is not really different in kind from medical records, so if the UK were to go along this route there are plenty of competing British providers; patriotism need not be an issue, though competition certainly is—if one did not like one’s health record Guardian one could always go elsewhere, just as banks must now transfer your standing orders intact to a new bank within days, whether they want to or not.
Most Internet usage surveys show the public trust companies more than the Government these days, on data as much as anything else. Google has the advantage that they have, in the last years, been transferring masses of printed material into digital form-the Google books project. This is relevant because one of the great scandals in the NHS is the shameful rate of the move to digitised patient records: in some hospitals consultants still have a fat folder of written notes for each patient, but the fifteen minutes allowed each one does not permit reading such a mass of material, so each consultation starts from scratch, usually with the patient describing their own condition! Digitised records could be summarised and absorbed in minutes.
The arguments for Cameron’s suggestion go way beyond cost saving and avoiding another giant state database of the kind so dear to Old and New Labour: they offer choice to the citizen, access to one’s own content with some control over it and, above all, deployment of a proven technology that would not need to be much specialised to the NHS at all, but just piggy-backed on years of competent management of vast data bases. The good news is that many kinds of companies have this experience, not just Google.
The Guardian last leader yesterday told of a woman—-who started as Eileen de Bont (!)—-and who changed her name to Pudsey Bear to raise money for charity.
Later the Identity and Passport Agency (did you know it had changed its name—and significantly!?) would not give her a passport on the ground the new name was frivolous. As the Grauniad wrote, portentiously but correctly, “The right to call yourself whatever name you damn well please is one of the small but great British liberties.”
This has always been a fundamental difference between us (and most English speaking countries) and countries like France where you have a legal name which you must use. In a country where Harold MacMillan would suddenly start calling himself “Stockton” (after his ennoblement) and bishops sign their letters “+John Oxon” it is obviously a very necessary liberty. The key case was some 25 years ago when a man who had opened more than a dozen post office savings bank accounts in as many names, and was prosecuted by the GPO, was acquitted on the ground that if no fraud was involved, there was no offence in calling yourself as many things as you liked, and that this was not tantmount to impersonation (as the traditional offence now called “identity theft” or “identity fraud” used to be called).
The reaction of the I+P Agency, even if overruled, shows change is in the air—I do not believe this has yet been clarified by the Bill introducing identity cards, but it is not hard to guess that this Government will want to abolish this age-old common law right; another good reason for NO2ID.
Interesting new take on user-generated activity from China
0 Comments Published by yorick.wilks April 25th, 2009 in *OIINEWSFrom Slashdot today:
+——————————————————————–+
| Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats |
| from the defending-against-gnats dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Friday April 24, @09:33 (Security) |
| http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216 |
+——————————————————————–+
An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the
[0]loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that seem to
be responsible for much of the cyber-trouble emerging from that nation.
QUoting: “For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s
government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has
discovered it’s more than that: it’s hundreds of thousands of everyday
Chinese civilians. … Jack Linchuan Qiu, a communications professor at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong [says:] ‘Chinese hackerism is not the
American “hacktivism” that wants social change. It’s actually very close
to the state. The Chinese distinction between the private and public
domains is very small.’ … According to [James Andrew Lewis, a senior
fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies], ‘The
government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And
sometimes it tasks them and controls them.’ In the end, he says, ‘it’s
easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.’”
Discuss this story at:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216
Links:
0. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-04/hackers-china-syndrome
Assuming this story is true, does it make this “patriotic activity” harder to condemn since it is not government originated? Given, too, that (a) the US invented hackers, (b) is a wildly patriotic country with many perceived enemies and (c) admires private enterprise, is it not odd that we have not seen, or had reported, much private international hackerdom from the US so far—Harrison Fords at the keyboard?
Those working in the theory and practice of artificial companions (www.companions-project.org) at the OII and elsewhere are, naturally enough, always on the lookout for new social implications of our future friends, the Companions. One future function might be as a backstop guarantor of identity, for the Companion’s user, when all biometrics have failed. It is a well-known problem of biometric definitions of identity, exploited in many movies, that they can be corrupted, stolen, removed etc. in a range of ingenious ways, after which the “owner” can be left helpless in a world in which the biometric had effectively defined their identity. Even without the science fiction, one can foresee an ongoing need for some non-scientific non-objective determiner of identity, stronger than the current fall-back to “Mother’s maiden name” and “Name of first pet” that the banks still use.
One can see the role here of a long-term computer companion, designed to spend years in conversation with its owner, building up a structured life of memories, gleaned from conversation, photographs, texts, ideally to be put in some semi-autobiographical form that surviving relatives will inherit, either as a full, frank intimate account of a whole life, probably with details and memories not known to the surviving spouses and children or, in the more extreme case, as a companion on a screen, say, looking and sounding like the former “owner” and able to discuss life from beyond the grave. Those who find this far fetched should look at Emily fromManchester:http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece and imagine her as a long-lost daughter.
One could also think of the Companion of a living user as some kind of informal guarantor of identity: a Companion would know very soon if it was talking to its owner or not—not in the sense of voice recognition, which is just one more biometric open to faking—–but in the sense of how you normally talk, what things you know about “yourself” and so on, much like a vast structured form of “What was your first pet called?”, except these need not be questions that had been pre-planned but more along the lines of “when were you last in Venice and what did you go to see?”, “Where were you in 1986?”. The potentially nasty slip here would be that this function of the Companion might be ostensibly in the interest of the authority demanding the identity verification, rather than of the owner, given that most people would find a Companion-world acceptable only if the Companion was the servant only of its owner, and not its manufacturer or the State. There need be no dilemma here if anyone can say “Let my Companion identify me as YW” and a central registry can always know (as with a car) that Companion xyz is registered to YW and can identify him and only him. All this is another argument for treating Companions nicely of course, just in case…….
Could the Internet be being used to systematically disadvantage consumers+
1 Comment Published by yorick.wilks October 17th, 2007 in *OIINEWSWe all assume, and have experiences to show, that internet purchasing is transparent and efficient and works to the benefit of everyone, except perhaps small bookshops and their equivalents everywhere: I will never now give up the speed and efficiency of Amazon.com for a bookshop. But a couple of very recent experiences have caused me to wonder whether there are not loopholes being exploited by corporations within the Internet market to trap consumers and prevent them making better choices. I am not suggesting any fraud or systematic conspiracy against the consumer, only that these experiences, with a very large American Airline have shown me the possibility of this, and I am exploring how widespread the practice is that I encountered this week in buying airline tickets. If it is widespread, the need for publicity or even consumer legislation is obvious.
The facts are these: on the main website of a large American Airline I purchased a ticket for £206 for my son to fly in two months from New York to Nevada. I entered the details of my American Express credit card, as I have in the course of many similar purchases. A screen came back saying “Ticket purchased” plus small print to say my electronic ticket and confirmation would follow shortly. On most previous occasions that had come by email within minutes from the company’s computers. Three days later it has not come, and I grew anxious and phoned the airline, because I know the online market is moving at great speed as Christmas approaches and, if I lose this ticket for any reason, I might get a worse bargain. I also know I might do better, as I had seen the same route available for £50 less with US Airways. But I am not very anxious, because I have been a loyal multimillion-mile customer with the large American Airline for 20 years and never had any problem of this sort.
My anxiety increased slightly on phoning because I was told a blatant lie: that the delay in ticketing is because I have a foreign-billed credit card and these must be checked by hand; I am in a queue and the ticket will follow in “ a coupe of days”. This rings all kinds of alarm bells because ticketing is normally instantaneous. It is made clear to me when I ask, and this is approaching the nub of this blog, that although the ticket is PURCHASED it is not TICKETED, and no I cannot cancel the whole transaction. The credit card checking excuse is absurd, because the same card for the same son had been instantly accepted by other US airline websites in the same week, and had I called and made this booking on the phone (for $10 surcharge!) my card would have been accepted instantly. The card-and-manual queue argument is a transparent falsehood.
None of this might matter were it not for another and quite separate experience with the same airline a day earlier, booking a flight for 5 people in the same December period. In that case, I again got the “Ticket Purchased” web page back and thought no more about it. But on returning to check the timings I realised the confirmation and E-ticket had again not come but on phoning I was informed my purchase had been cancelled. It had been cancelled, I was told in rough tones, because I had made two reservations for the same group to two different cities in the US in that period, in Nevada and Texas. I said, as one would, yes but so what: they were both 24 hour options that would automatically expire at no harm to the airline. This is normal practice by consumers; but I had actually purchased one of the reservations with my credit card. Why, I wailed, had they cancelled the one I had purchased and not the other one where I did nothing to follow it up.
I was told that when the computer detected double booking it cancelled all but one reservation “at random”. Now, it cannot be the case that a multi-billion airline is unable to write software for the Internet to cancel an unpurchased reservation in preference to a purchased one. Yet my own naivety and company loyalty sent me back again at this point to the web to buy a new ticket for each of the 5 at £100 more a head. The glitch and the cancellation had just given the American Airline £500 more for absolutely no benefit to me.
It was this earlier experience that has fully roused my suspicions in the case of the second ticket, for the son and still unresolved, that something systematic might be happening here and, whatever it is, fraud or something else, it is unlikely to be mere incompetence on the part of the airline. Consider the issue in market terms: I as a consumer have been trapped now for three days, unable to cancel my “purchased ticket” and buy elsewhere. The American Airline, as I saw with the earlier group of 5 tickets, can cancel that purchase at any time and not even tell me, which could have allowed the group to turn up at an airport at Christmas believing they had Electronic tickets while actually having nothing! By luck I spotted that one in time. This imbalance of power is extraordinary: a consumer trapped and unable to shift options for an indefinite period and a company that may or may not honour the purchase, when it chooses. Its computers could clearly be seeking to sell that same seat to a higher bidder—if that were the case everything we have been taught to believe about internet purchases of such tickets is unreliable. Certainly in the case of the 5 tickets, the Airline reneged on its “tickets purchased” claim and sold them back to me, in effect, for £500 more because I was nervous, loyal ands acting semi-irrationally for fear of having family with no travel at Christmas,
If these practices are being driven by design rather than incompetence the Internet ticket market for major airlines is a far worse bargain for consumers than has generally been thought—and much much better for the airlines—-and the option of buying by phone for $10 more is the best bargain of all.
Samson Abramsky at OUCL asks in a recent paper…1.2 What Function does the Internet Compute?
0 Comments Published by yorick.wilks May 19th, 2007 in *OIINEWSOur second puzzle reflects the changing conception of computation which has been developing
within Computer Science over the past three decades.
The traditional conception of computation is that we compute an output as a function of an input, by an algorithmic process. This is the basic setting for the entire field of algorithms and complexity, for example. So what we are computing is clear — it is a function.
But the reality of modern computing: distributed,
global, mobile, interactive, multi-media, embedded, autonomous, virtual, pervasive —
forces us to confront the limitations of this viewpoint.
Traditionally, the dynamics of computing systems — their unfolding behaviour in space
and time — has been a mere means to the end of computing the function which specifies the
algorithmic problem which the system is solving.
In much of contemporary computing, the
situation is reversed: the purpose of the computing system is to exhibit certain behaviour.
The implementation of this required behaviour will seek to reduce various aspects of the
specification to the solution of standard algorithmic problems.
What does the Internet compute?
Surely not a mathematical function . . .
Moral: We need a theory of the dynamics of informatic processes, of interaction, and in-
formation flow, as a basis for answering such fundamental questions as :
• What is computed?
• What is a process?
• What are the analogues to Turing-completeness and universality when we are concerned
with processes and their behaviours, rather than the functions which they compute?
[Im not certain I understand the question, but it seems a nice one to ask anyway! YW]
but surely not death, which, with taxes, tends to be permanent and unchanging?
A moment’s reflection shows that is not so, and civilizations differ in nothing more than how they treat death and its subsequent state, if any. Even within a single society, our treatment of death, and our reactions to it, are so different from those of our Victorian ancestors —with their crepe bands, black-rimmed newspapers and mourning hats—-that they now seem more like a foreign tribe.Shrines are normally for the dead, whether elaborate tombs or small candles in the corner of Japanese living rooms; but Internet shrines are different, and it is often hard to know if the owner of a web page is alive or dead. I turned recently to the URL of an Italian I had once met, and discovered from his webpage he was now famous as the Father of Italian Cybernetics. I had no idea he had become so celebrated, but what was hard to discover was the answer to what had brought me there: whether he was alive or dead. It is this crucial borderline —–dead vs. alive—– critical to physiology and the law, that the Internet systematically fudges.
If, in the future, to be is to be in cyberspace, then an area ripe for development is email, where there are huge commercial opportunities for postmortem email that are well within technical reach, given the advances in computer processing of natural language in recent years. With only simple electronics, we are all familiar now with goodbye videos from the deceased at their own funerals, and some modern gravestones, known in America as Vidstones, have, instead of a simple memorial picture built into the stone, a small video of the deceased, solar-powered, that can be activated by a switch.
But email has been subjected to a wide range of analysis techniques to understand its content, at some acceptable level, most notoriously by companies and national security agencies: but such analysis can also decide whether the email content is positive or negative, whether it is asking for something or announcing a lecture, and so on. These and many other kinds of email content can now be extracted by reasonably intelligent programs, and it would be a very small move to have them automatically replied to as well, a service that could continue without a living correspondent. This would require not only the special software but a stable host server, such as a university or perhaps, in the future, a foundation specifically set up for the purpose of repling to emails to the dead. That would keep someone in cyberspace, as it were, for a fixed period for a fee, just as medieval chantries would pray for your soul for so many years for the appropriate donation. Even now graves are rented only for a fixed period.
One’s email could move seamlessly into an after-life mode: academics, for example, are used to accepting and declining invitations to lecture by email, and sending out their publications as offprints as attachments in the same way. It is perfectly straightforward to extend the standard Unix “Vacation program” which normally replies to email by saying you are on holiday and when you are coming back, so as to say:
I am sorry I cannot take up your invitation to lecture at your University because I died on September 1st 2008. I would have loved to come and see you all again; thank you so much for asking me
And so on. Sending out a requested offprint electronically would be straightforward, as would the provision of bibliographic or autobiographical information with the standard search technologies Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.
A recent Internet development relevant to all this is Second Life (https://secondlife.com/), a virtual world where some two million people have taken up a form of residence using avatars: artificial appearances or simulations of themselves who meet others, including the avatars of people not currently on line (at the time of writing only eleven thousand of the two million subscribers are actually on line). Second life has obvious resonances of “after-life” as well as “parallel life”, which is the one its creators intended. The expansion of Second Life is extraordinary, with, at the time of writing, sixty thousand acres “sold”, a space which is (virtually) expanding by 8% a month. The sales are in “Linden dollars” inside Second Life but they can be bought and sold for real money elsewhere on the web, which has given the virtual economy aspects of a real one.
Famous singers are now releasing songs within Second Life which the buyer can get and play there. I had a perfectly serious conversation last month trying to convince the British Library—which sometimes doubts the quality of its “outreach’ in a demotic age—that it could buy land in Second Life and erect at least a large hoarding on it, saying “LIBRARY HERE SOON”.
But what has this to do with the Internet? Well, life as an avatar, after one’s own death, would certainly be a form of life, even in a virtual world. Your avatar on the other side could continue to function and appear to meet people, talking as it had been programmed to, visiting places and living a full if rather thin second life. It would not be you, of course, and at best rather like the schoolmen saw the lives of angels, as all form but no substance.
Other possibilities arise from the opportunity we will have very soon of putting every possible fact, memory and datum about our lives onto the Internet itself. Last week the British library hosted a meeting on Memories for Life ((http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/connected/2006/12/13/nlife13.xml), a topic generated as a challenge for modern computing a few years ago and funded since then as a university research network (www.memories-for-life.org). The core idea is that computer storage is now so large and cheap that it becomes feasible to envisage recordings of everything we say, hear, write, see, eat or meet in eighty years of life, along with all our medical readings, as being stored on the Internet in some moderate and quite available space (known to the technically minded as 28 terabytes, according to an estimate by Alan Dix of Lancaster University). This is a huge amount of space but, at the present rate of progress, will be quite cheap to buy with a year or two, and could be stored on something no bigger than a sugar lump. The real problem is how we could possibly search all those memories and facts, even if we had them available; how we could begin to make sense of them, in the way a biographer makes sense of a subject’s life by careful editing and selection.
The notion of all life on the Internet may be fanciful, but it is plain that huge chunks of our lives are going to be put there, not only the emails and the documents we write, but all our photographs and videos, which we are being encouraged to show to everyone in the world on sites like flicr (flicr.com) and YouTube (youtube.com). A possibility discussed at the British Library was that people may be able in the future to organise their lives and memories and data on the Internet with the aid of special automated assistants that can talk and converse in a normal way. This is the same motive as that behind all the recent offers by Google, Vodafone and others to offer free storage space to the public for their life data; but in return, the companies will get access to people’s memories, tastes and records and, under certain safeguards, will know what adverts to send personally to them.
Something slightly more academic and benign is the notion of a computer Companion: a conversational agent that stays with one for a long period, appears to learn one’s tastes and habits, and helps to organize and select all this personal material for its “owner”. One can think of a Companion as best suited to the elderly, living alone and in need of company, needing to be reminded when to take pills and of the soap opera plots if they have been forgotten. Concretely, the Companion could be a mobile phone, or a computer screen, but more likely something like a furry handbag that sits on one’s lap and talks, light to carry about and definitely not a robot. The Japanese have already gone some way in this direction: the BBC website carris a story of an elderly Japanese lady, Akino, who has a commercial companion called, Primo Puel, whose Japanese is primitive but Akino is reported as being comforted by it, liking to “hear it chatting away to itself in the other room”. Akino added that she found more comfort in it than talking to her late husband’s shrine in the corner. Readers will remember Japanese toys without any language like Tamagochi that had no language at all but aroused powerful emotions of care towards them in their owners.
Primo Puel has no language but natural computer conversation has come a long way even if it has not yet the everyday success of machine translation, which can now give a reasonable if basic translation of any web page on demand. The Loeber website (www.loebner-competition,org) shows the year by year increasing capacity of programs that take part in its annual computer conversation competition. There is now a major European initiative to build a computer Companion using these much stronger methods for deriving computer conversation: it is called Companions (www.nlp.shef.ac.uk/companions) and I coordinate it at the University of Sheffield, where it will run for four years with fifteen EU and US partners at a cost to tax payers of some €13 million.
It is said that the elderly in care homes spend much of their time shuffling their memories in the form of photographs; soon these will be digital images, of course, and the EU Companion will start there, discussing with its elderly owner who is in each picture, where it was taken and what its importance is. The idea, which may or may not succeed, is to use conversation with the elderly to build up coherent narratives, stories of parts of the owner’s life, the stories which the images tell. Normally only those with talent, resources and leisure write autobiographies, but, if the Companions project succeeds, everyone could assemble some form of autobiography for their children, and undergo, with the Companion’s help, some form of debriefing of their whole life. Many learn little of the early life of their own parents and then, suddenly, it is too late to ask, unless one has been bold and persuaded them to talk into a tape recorder and reveal their memories.
Companions is a futuristic project, but the Japanese have shown there is a market for anything plausible of this sort, if it reaches an acceptable level of voice and tone and a realistic level of chat. If it does so, then another interesting possibility arises, one close to our original theme of the Internet and life after death. The technical basis of the Companion is a technical matter called machine learning, or what some call data mining: the ability of a computer to learn, within limits, things it did not know before. An obvious successful example is learning to understand or imitate a voice: anyone who buys an IBM typewriter that takes dictation automatically has to train its computer to understand the owner’s voice, so as to minimise typing errors.
The same process would allow a computer to imitate its owner’s voice: Stephen Hawking’s insistence on keeping his twenty year-old electronic voice has had the effect of masking the great advances that have been made. The Companion, after years of debriefing the same owner’s life could also, with today’s technology, produce a reasonable approximation to their voice. It would also have an organised set of images, emails and documents that tell its owner’s life story. So the important question would become: what would to happen to it when the owner died?
Many might prefer to destroy the Companion of a loved one at that point, as some used to put down an aged parent’s dogs and others, like ancient Egyptians, killed the wives of rulers at their deaths. But most would not now do that, but would retain the Companion, with its now familiar voice, its memories and detailed knowledge of the loved one, as a powerful and moving memorial, and almost a potted form of the departed.
This is not a very red-blooded life after death on the Internet, but it is something many will find attractive in the future, for themselves, their parents and for their own children. It is no more, perhaps, that a computerised and updated form of the Vidstone or, in a more literary vein, the view of Jules Romains in his prewar novel La Mort de Quelqu’un, that one had some form of existence so long as one was remembered by someone alive and no longer; it is a view not far from much modern rational common-sense.
Ray Kurzweil, the computer pioneer who built the first dictation-typewriter, is said to be devoting his old age entirely to health products so he can stay alive long enough to benefit from what he believes will be the next great technical advance: the reproduction of every human brain cell in a computer, or in silico, as he puts it. The Companion that simulated a dead person, as described above, would be much less radical than that: it might imitate behaviour but would have no tie to any structure in the departed’s body or brain. But alas, even Kurtzweil’s surviving in silico twin will not be he himself, and will deliver him no more of the traditional afterlife promise than would the survival of his identical twin brother.
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About
Yorick Wilks is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, where he directs the Institute for Language, Speech and Hearing. He received his M. A. and Ph.D. (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, and his recent books include: Artificial Believers (Erlbaum 1991), Electric Words (MIT, 1996) and Machine Conversations (Kluwer, 2001). He is a Fellow of the European and American Societies for Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of of the EPSRC College of Computing and a member of the UK Computing Research Council.
Latest
- Facebook after death!
- European Forum at Alpbach
- Towards virtuous spamming?
- Google and our health records
- Is your self-naming right secure?
- Interesting new take on user-generated activity from China
- Companions and identity
- Could the Internet be being used to systematically disadvantage consumers+
- Samson Abramsky at OUCL asks in a recent paper…1.2 What Function does the Internet Compute?
- Death and the Internet