As humans, we are constantly looking ways to delay the inevitability of death. But while we may never discover the fountain of youth, Mindful Industries has created an innovative solution to preserve what hasn’t been possible to pass on before — personalities.
Meet Oli, an artificially intelligent cat that works with users to build their own digital doppelganger and preserve their personality, knowledge, behavior and more for all times to come. Think of it as a digital immortality. According to Mindful Industries, humans will be able to speak to their past selves, access their whole life in one place, and share their personalities with their great-grandchildren for the first time ever.
After signing up on https://uploadme.ai/, Oli immediately begins to process data the user chooses to share such as email and social media. Users can also rate the accuracy of facts about themselves and periodically, Oli will send an email asking the user to confirm certain information. In addition, if users share these email questions on social media, Oli can scan the reactions and comments from friends to further improve his image and knowledge of the user. As Oli learns more over the years, the doppelganger will become increasingly accurate.
We spoke with Founder of Mindful Industries, Jan Kremlacek, to learn a bit more about Oli and his path to preserving personalities.
Q: How did the idea for Oli come to be?
Jan: It began with my desire to “make the world better.” Everyone’s life deserves valuation, legacy, and understanding. From a social perspective, the value of human life is decreasing significantly and we are losing our human values as a society. So, as a part of my life journey, I decided to do something to support the sharing of wisdom and values. At the first stage we invented the “Digital Immortality” part of Oli. This is the uploadme.ai project.
Q: How does Oli work?
Jan: Oli reads your data that is readily available and tries to compute “the ultimate formula” of you. To become a copy of you as best as it can. We are continuously working on the algorithm. It’s not rigid, and should not be.
Q: In what ways does the doppelganger improve over time? What would the conversation look like in say, 20 years?
Jan: Well, it’s almost impossible to answer, but let me try to explain. The process of learning (in AI in general, as well as Oli does) is more or less similar to toddler growth. Oli learns everything of you, trying to identify patterns, and forget what is not useful anymore — just like a human brain. The problem these days is the amount of data and computational power. Theoretically, and this is what I believe in, in the future we humans will be able to gather enough large dataset of us, as well as have enough computational power to create a very precise Doppelganger.
Let’s take as an example NLP (Natural Language Processing). Just couple of years ago you could not imagine machines will understand you. And it already happened. Or vision recognition, could you imagine few years ago such a technology will emerge in such a short period of time? By statistics, our technological progress doubles itself every 2 years, more or less and it’s growing exponentially. Far more progress in AI is totally unpredictable, somehow 1% improvement can change overall quality of everything.
The internet itself is 47 years old, but more interestingly WWW is just 27 years old. What a change of the world in general in just couple of decades.
Based on that outlook, I’m absolutely sure, in 20 years you will not be able to see significant difference between human to human and human to Doppelganger conversation.
Q: So, is the Doppelganger essentially a clone of your mind? Is it secure?
Jan: No, the aim of Oli’s Doppelganger is not to clone your mind and not to recreate or digitally store an exact copy of your personality. I do not really believe it’s even possible, especially if you consider my spiritual background and experience. The aim is to share your wisdom, experiences, thoughts, and even emotions; in life beyond your physical death.
Oli is secure. Anything Oli creates stays between him and the user and it cannot be shared with Mindful Industries or any third party. Oli also translates all data into his own advanced language, indecipherable by humans, and keeps it on servers around the globe.
Q: What is your background?
Jan: Around 20 years ago I started a web design company in my country of origin (Czech Republic), which I later successfully sold to the No. 1 web design company in the world at the time, Uk-based Deepend. I was the only man from Eastern Europe to have done this. With the team from London, we achieved “The Most Creative Agency of the Year” award in 2000.
Later on I started working on Generative Art and Design and became a design ambassador in Czech Republic for Google. I also helped build a couple internationally recognised brands such as Curaprox.
However, these years were mostly years of searching. I was diagnosed as bipolar, manic-depressive. I somehow ended up in Himalaya India studying yoga, meditation, ancient Vedanta wisdom, and practicing as well. Not exactly a monk, but almost 😉
Well, as I love learning new things, I’m always learning what fascinates me. More recently, that was AI. Nowadays, I’m skilled in many fields, from art and design, to IT (I coded most of Oli’s software), AI, yoga, psychology and philosophy. When I finally managed my own demons, I realized there must be a way to use AI to help people be happier and pass on the things they’ve learned in life and their wisdoms. That’s where Oli started.
Q: What are your plans for Oli in the near future?
Jan: Right now we are working on a “Research Centre” to jump a step above the overall quality of Oli’s software. (that’s continuous development of course, as far as economics allows). This year we will investigate better NLG (Natural Language Generation).
In addition, we plan to incorporate a visual part, with the possibility to assign customer’s visual memories, such as selfies, to actual time periods, moods, etc. We also plan to invent more friendly conversation with Oli to better gather and store your actual memories, opinions, and approaches.
We all want leave our mark on the world; a legacy; either for our descendants or for the whole of mankind. On a threshold of human-level Artificial Intelligence the technology means we can go beyond social networks: allowing us exist, communicate and think outside of our bodies, forever.
Oli is only $1 a month or users can choose between two one-time forever fees ($248 or $990). More information about Oli and subscriptions can be found at https://uploadme.ai/.