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When Robot Personalities Mimic the Dead
The potential creation of robots mimicking the deceased could be controversial, in terms of how people react to them.
Credit: Hanson Robotics
The possibility of robots with personalities that mimic those of celebrities and other deceased persons could be controversial in terms of how people may react to them.
Indiana University roboticist Karl MacDorman notes there may be technology already in existence to enable a robot personality to partly simulate that of a real-life person. He also says an actual person's interactions with others could provide behavioral data to inform the development of such a machine, and existing software can use vocal samples to produce a synthesized version of a person's voice.
"While an individual may find comfort in having a robot or digital double impersonate a deceased loved one, others may well find this creepy, and the practice could be stigmatized," MacDorman cautions.
Google was recently awarded a patent for creating robot personalities that could be downloaded as software and transferred between different robots via an online service. The patent describes that personality, or character, as "a program already stored, or it could be something in the cloud. If the latter, the robot would interact with the cloud to pull sufficient information regarding the 'new' persona to thereby recreate a simulacrum for the robot." The patent also says the robot persona's constituent information could come from a user device.
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