‘You could upload your dead loved ones to a computer by end of the year’

A computer scientist is urging the world to record their elderly parents and loved ones as he predicts consciousness could be uploaded onto a computer this year, MailOnline reported.

Dr Pratik Desai, who has founded multiple Silicon Valley AI startups, said that if people have enough video and voice recorders of their loved ones, there is a '100 percent chance' of relatives 'living with you forever.'

Desai, who has created his own ChatGPT-like system, wrote on Twitter: 'This should be even possible by end of the year.'

Many scientists believe the rapid advancements in AI, which ChatGPT is spearheading, are poised to usher in a new golden era for technology.

However, the world's greatest minds are split on the technology - Elon Musk and more than 1,000 tech leaders are calling for a pause, warning it could destroy humanity.

On the other side are other experts, like Bill Gates, who believe AI will improve our lives - and it seems other experts are on board with the idea it will help us live on forever.

Desai is on the side of Gates, believing we can recreate our dead loved ones as avatars living in a computer.

The process would include digitizing videos, voice recordings, documents and photos of the person, then fed to an AI system that learns everything it can about the individual.

Users can then design a specific avatar that looks and acts just like their living relative did.

The advancement of ChatGPT has progressed one company working on virtual humans.

The project called Live Forever creates a VR robot of a person with the same speech and mannerisms as the person it was tasked with replicating.

Artur Sychov, the founder of Live Forever, told Motherboard in 2022 that he predicted the technology would be out in five years, but due to recent advancements in AI, he expects it will only be a short time.

'We can take this data and apply AI to it and recreate you as an avatar on your land parcel or inside your NFT world, and people will be able to come and talk to you,' Sychov told Motherboard.

'You will meet the person. And you would maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it's actually AI. That's the goal.'

Another AI company, DeepBrain AI, has created a memorial hall that lets people reunite with their dead loved ones in an immersive experience.

The service, called Rememory, uses photos, videos, and a seven-hour interview of the person while still living.

The AI-powered virtual person is designed with deep learning technologies to capture the individual's look and voice, which is displayed on a 400-inch screen.

In 2020, a Korean television show used virtual reality to reunite a mother with her seven-year-old daughter, who died in 2016.

The show, 'Meeting You,' recounted the story of a family's loss of their seven-year-old daughter Nayeon.

The two could touch, play and hold conversations, and the little girl reassured her mother that she was no longer in pain.

Jang Ji-sung, Nayeon's mother, put on the Vive virtual reality (VR) headset and was transported into a garden where her daughter stood there smiling in a bright purple dress.

'Oh my pretty, I have missed you,' the mother can be heard saying as she strokes the digital replica of her daughter.

Desai did not provide many details about his idea of the technology, but former Google Engineer Ray Kurzweil is also working on a digital afterlife for humans - specifically to resurrect his father. 

Kurzweil, 75, said his father passed when he was 22 years old and hopes to one day talk to him through the help of a computer.

'I will be able to talk to this re-creation,' he told BBC in 2012. 'Ultimately, it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father.' 

Kurzweil explained he has hundreds of boxes containing documents, recordings, movies and photographs of his father, which he is digitizing.

'A very good way to express all of this documentation would be to create an avatar that an AI would create that would be as much like my father as possible, given the information we have about him, including possibly his DNA,' Kurzweil said.

The scientist continued to explain that his digital father would undergo a Turing Test, which is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

'If an entity passes the Turing test, let alone a specific person, that person is conscious,' Kurzweil said.

Along with uploading memories from the dead, Kurzweil also predicts that humans will reach immortality in just eight years.

He recently spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing 'nanobots.'

These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer.

Kurzweil was hired by Google in 2012 to 'work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing,' but he was making predictions in technological advances long before.

In 1990, he predicted the world's best chess player would lose to a computer by 2000, and it happened in 1997 when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.

Kurzweil made another startling prediction in 1999: he said that by 2023 a $1,000 laptop would have a human brain's computing power and storage capacity.

He said that machines are already making us more intelligent and connecting them to our neocortex will help people think more smartly.

Contrary to the fears of some, he believes that implanting computers in our brains will improve us.

'We're going to get more neocortex, we're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier', he said.

'We're really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.'

Rather than a vision of the future where machines take over humanity, Kurzweil believes we will create a human-machine synthesis that will make us better.

The concept of nanomachines being inserted into the human body has been in science fiction for decades.