David speaking at CogX on Virtual Humans and Digital Immortality

 

Somehow forgot to blog this when I did the talk at CogX back in 2019 but still highly relevant and been linking to it from the updated website so I thought I might as well post it up here as well.

RAF's Stories from the Future - Complete with Virtual Personas

The Royal Air Force has just released a second edition of their "Stories from the Future" - fiction pieces designed to get people thinking about the future of the Services and Air Defence.

One of the stories, "Heads Together" draws on some of the work we've done for MOD around the concept of virtual personas:

"Diverse viewpoints make for better decisions, so imagine a world where the whole of society engages with Defence through some form of service and the friends that you make there can convene virtually when you need to discuss a problem, whether they now work in Defence, in industry, in academia – or at all. In this tale, we look at how our people might benefit from this in the future"

The question that the article explicitly poses at the end is:

How would you feel about bring perpetuated in virtual form after you had changed jobs, left Defence or even died? Would advice from your virtual self be a liability to your real self?

You can read this, and the other stories at https://www.raf.mod.uk/documents/pdf/stories-from-the-future-second-edition/

Aura Blogpost - "From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife"

 

David has a blog post on "From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife" on the blog of the new Aura website/service- "designed to help you prepare your memories, important information and connect with loved ones before you die", part of the burgeoning digital afterlife/memorial sector but also looking to open up the conversations ahead of time.

You can read the blog post in full at: https://www.aura.page/articles/from-virtual-personas-to-a-digital-afterlife/

It's also interesting to compare some of the ideas in the post with Channel 4's recent documentary on Peter: The Human Cyborg as there certainly seems to be some common ground worth exploring.

David speaking at the BrumAI Meetup in September

David will be speaking at the BrumAI Meetup in September. Details are:

Tuesday, 24 September 2019
6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Aston University Lecture Theatre MB419
Aston University Main Building · Birmingham

Register at https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/brum-ai/events/263802176/

David will speak about the work that his company Daden has done with Chatbots since the early 2000s, and where he sees chatbots fitting into a bigger picture of virtual humans and artificial intelligence. In particular David will talk about Daden's work on virtual personas and semantic knowledge graphs the role they could play in corporate knowledge management, and the ethical issues they raise as pre-cursors to a form of digital immortality.