Should we let AI immortalize our thoughts, selves?
Projects aiming to preserve the human mind spark fears about risk
A project to "revive" Russian poet Alexander
Pushkin is underway in the Russian town of Skolkovo, a special economic
zone.
MOSCOW -- There are always people in front of the statue of Alexander Pushkin, the great early 19th-century Russian poet, on Moscow's Arbat Street pedestrian mall.
An old woman, asked whether she would like to speak with Pushkin, said she would indeed be happy to meet the genius.
A project underway in the Russian town of Skolkovo, which is designated as a special economic zone, aims to fulfill that wish by creating a Pushkin humanoid robot equipped with artificial intelligence. The robot's AI system has mastered poems and letters written by Pushkin and is designed to evolve by studying its own conversations with humans.
Developer Vladimir Konyshev, the general manager of Neurobotics, said the robot can teach students "his own" poems while exchanging opinions with them as a teacher of literature.
Think faster
Famous people are not the only targets of such projects. Randal Koene, a former research professor at Boston University who leads brain science studies at the Los Angeles-based venture company Kernel, plans to preserve human minds via the internet and make them live on as another version of ourselves.
The project aims to first re-create the hippocampus, which is deeply associated with memories, using AI. If the entire brain can be reproduced, a personality can also be created.
But Koene is aiming for even more. He also wants to expand the human capacity using AI.
The virtual clones created by the project will be able to think 10 times faster than our real selves and memorize everything they see and hear. Over the course of their eternal lives, they may be able to accomplish feats that are impossible during a normal human lifetime.
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