A “Digital Twin” Could Make You Immortal – Here’s How.

It’s January 17, 2020— the world has yet to change; Wuhan locks down six days later — and Emil Jimenez is on a train from Vienna to Prague. His daughter, then four years old, inadvertently activates Siri while playing pony games on her iPad. 

“She’s like, ‘Daddy,’ y’know, ‘what is this?'” Jimenez tells me on a video call from the Czech Republic. Jimenez tells her it’s Siri, and encourages her to talk to the digital assistant.

Her first question is if Siri has a mother.

From there, she peppers the artificial intelligence with the kinds of questions kids ask — do you like ice cream? do you like toys? — and, by the end of their conversation, tells Siri she loves it, that she’s her best friend.

Jimenez, who has a background in psychology, sees this heartwarming interaction and is struck by how quickly and seamlessly his daughter formed a relationship with the AI — we usually ring Siri when we need something, even if it’s a laugh.

But a generation reared on conversational interactions with technology is quickly developing a relationship with devices, AIs, and robots completely different from those of us who didn’t come of age with AI, Jimenez thinks. 

Jimenez knows how Siri works — how a natural language processing algorithm understands your speech, how a deep-learning black box sits up in a cloud, from which Siri throws down answers like a baby Zeus.

 And he has an idea.

“Today (my daughter) speaks to Siri. But one day in the future, I want her to speak to me. Because I know I’m not going to be around forever, and I love my daughter to bits … 

“What if I’m always able to help her?”

A Personal Digital Twin

This is a story about “your” future. Or at least, your possible future.

Jimenez’s desire led him to found Mind Bank Ai, a startup whose mission is staggeringly ambitious: to break the chain of death and knowledge loss — at least, for those you leave behind. 

The company wants to provide a simulacra of you that can live indefinitely — can be called upon, consulted, commiserated and joked and argued with. 

This “personal digital twin” Mind Bank Ai envisions will be built up, across your lifetime, from a data set of you. 

Through conversations — a mixture of prompted topics and more organic interaction — the AI will craft a model meant to “think” like you, understand your personality, and, eventually, be able to apply that model to future conditions: answering as you would, conversing like you would. 

“What’s wrong? What do you like to eat? How did you meet your wife? Why are you divorced?” Jimenez laughs. He envisions Mind Bank Ai asking “all the questions of life,” akin to the conversations we have to get to know one another. (Getting to know us is, essentially, what the AI would be doing, after all.)

Jimenez wants to create a digital twin which would, at the least, speak in your voice, as voice can be powerfully evocative, capable of bringing how you look (however they want you to look; healthy if you had been sick, for example) in their mind’s eye.

While that personal data is gathered, users can take these conversations with Mind Bank Ai as a chance to self-reflect and better get to know themselves — Socratic psychology, or “a fitness tracker for your mind” — Jimenez says. 

Jimenez envisions interacting with Mind Bank Ai as a chance to self-reflect, while all the while the digital twin becomes closer to being like you.

Speaking Forever

It is after you die that Mind Bank Ai would truly come into its own, like a digital cryogenics lab.

A personal digital twin is the latest iteration of an idea as old as humankind: the desire to, if not live forever, then at least be able to pass on your knowledge, experience, insights. 

While your perfect digital twin will not be winking into life anytime soon, the capabilities of modern natural language processors (the deep-learning programs behind Siri, Alexa, and predictive texting) and the impressive facsimiles known as deepfakes are moving the…