Better than life

In the Sci-Fi series ‘Gateway‘ by Frederik Pohl the main character had access to a AI VR system that could stand in for him for phone calls and virtual meetings.  It had sufficient knowledge of his requirements and how he thought so he could be in many places at once and in communication with several people at once.  (and that is before he dies and becomes a multitasking computer program but that’s another story.)

So when I read about this project called LifeLike I could see that they are looking at creating a similar program and that they are right at the start of the project.    I see the visual component coming on in leaps and bounds a bit like the special effects in films where they can actually replace actors like they have done with Oliver Reed where when he died whilst in the middle of  filming he was replaced by a computer generated image in Gladiator.

I’m also fairly confident that they can generate a computer program that thinks like me 95% of the time and can respond to certain stimuli.  Something I could use when chatting on IMs to people about low profile stuff where I could be called to help when it got a bit deep.  What I’m not convinced about is they can create one for business use.   One that would last five minutes in a business like environment without getting me fired and summarily executed.

I still think we are decades and several generations of hardware away from that sort of AI but we are woring towards it.     To be honest it’s also an area I would love to be involved with as AI is one of my interests and things have moved on significantly from when I was looking at it with programs like LISP just to provide chat based systems that provided basic AI functionality.