Perfect thinks that what we really care about is a person's inner life. We want to know if that survives when their body dies. Right now AI, it's a lot more like if your husband knew how to impersonate your mom in texts. With the AI models, not only do they not have an inner life, they don't even know what the words that they're producing mean. If Parfits View is correct, you have to encode the inner life, the actual conscious experiences of a person into an AI for that person to survive.
When Justin’s mom was diagnosed with cancer, he knew he wanted to keep talking to her after she died. So together they made an AI version of her, training it on her speech patterns and memories. Now he is scaling his findings so that anyone can continue their relationships with loved ones after their deaths. Justin even believes this can one day lead to digital immortality.
Grief experts are only now dealing with bereaved people who create digital versions of their loved ones. We look at what they say about the phenomenon, and what philosophers think about whether the best AI version of a person can actually be them.
Co-produced with Alexandra Salmon, guests include Justin Harrison, CEO of You, Only Virtual, Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, and Dr. Debra Bassett.
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