Would You Freak Out If You Could Talk To Dead People? - Miki Szeles's Report on Reinforce AI Conference
Tags: machinelearnig, ai, dataanalysis, datascience
Published: 2022-03-09 20:25:16

---
title: Would You Freak Out If You Could Talk To Dead People? - Miki Szeles's Report on Reinforce AI Conference
published: true
date: 2022-03-09 19:52:52 UTC
tags: machinelearnig, ai, dataanalysis, datascience
canonical_url: https://mszeles.com/would-you-freak-out-if-you-could-talk-to-dead-people-miki-szeless-report-on-reinforce-ai-conference
---
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/50wl1nne2y77qx6ia9qa.png)
 **I would freak out as hell in the beginning but I would definitely try it. It is sort of already possible with the help of AI.** In case you are interested in the how, just keep on reading. I am pretty sure you won't regret it. 😊

As I promised in my previous article [Reinforce AI Conference 2022 Starts Tomorrow](https://dev.to/mszeles/reinforce-ai-conference-2022-starts-tomorrow-14bh) **I am taking notes and sharing my writings about the speeches I found most insightful.**

## Prelude

The **first presentation was the most astounding speech I have ever heard.** And it was just the first one, so I am very excited to hear the other ones. 😊

The **first speaker was Richard Boyd who is the CEO and founder at Tanjo Inc.** The **title** of the speech was **Partnering with Machine Learning to Improve Outcomes**. To be honest, based on the title I did not expect what I heard.

As Richard explained, **he will discuss real-world examples of how machine learning and technology can be harnessed to improve outcomes in society.**

## His background

Richard is **working in the US for more than 10 years.** He has a **series of presentations** held at different locations **with the title Life the Metaverse and Everything.**

As you might have already guessed **it is from Douglas Adams**.

He has shared a very exciting backstory, in which even Dougles Adams took part.

**In 1997 they were working together with Douglas Adams on a game called Starship Titanic NLP**. I [found the game on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/467290/Starship_Titanic/). It seems like a bargain for 5.99€.

![Starship Titanic Game.jpg](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1646845164861/7JBRnvOY-.jpg)Actually, I used an [AI-based tool img.upscaler](https://imgupscaler.com/), to upscale this image. 😊

**There were characters in the game with whom you could talk.** They were also learning during the time and **there were conversations that even surprised the developers.** The algorithm was called **Velocitext** (I might mishear it), but **Douglas Adams called it Spookytalk** cause of the thing mentioned beforehand. 😊

## The stages of information ages

There are **3 stages of information ages.** Let's see them one-by-one

### The opening

The opening started in **1968 and went up till 2009. In this stage programmers tell the machines what to do.**

### The middle game

We are **currently in the middle gam** e and we do not exactly know how long will it last.

In this age, **machines are adapting to us** , like Siri and Alexa. The **interfaces are becoming ambient, we do not even have to push a button, as our apps are understanding us.**

### The End Game

There are **two important things** belonging to here.

One of them is **ubiquitous AI** which is a type of AI that can detect subtleties in human communication and actually display a level of common sense otherwise thought to be unachievable.

The other one is the **technological singularity** which is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

You can read [Vernor Vinge's The Technological Singularity writing](https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html) in case you are interested in more detail.

Richard also mentioned the **Kurzweil curve**. Kurzweil explains that evolutionary progress is exponential because of positive feedback; the results of one stage are used to create the next stage.

Driven by **Moore's law we will get to a point where a 1000$ technology is overperforming the human brain**. Moore's law states: the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years (18 months).

It is a little bit **a self fulfilling prophecy** , but up till now it his law is still valid. And by the coming of quantum computing it is highly possible it will continue.

Some other topic which will come

- How do we understand human behavior?
- Animated personas
- Large scale agent-based simulations
- Game characters: values, feelings, thinking about different subjects.

## Victor Hugo resurrected

And finally, we arrived at the most interesting part in which we can see how we can speak with dead people.

**Everything related to Victor Hugo has been fed into a machine learning algorithm and by doing that Victor Hugo has been resurrected.**

**You can engage in conversations with him, you can ask what does he think about the current age? He can watch videos, read articles and he scores them.**

**It is called the empathy engine.**

Based on this process **everybody could be resurrected about whom there is enough resources.**

I highly recommend checking Richard's company's page: https://tajno.io where for example you can learn more about machine-powered animated personas.[You can request a live demo](https://tanjo.ai/get-in-touch#demo). I gave my email address a few minutes ago and now I am waiting for the response. I am very excited. 😊

According to [Muriel Vega](https://hypepotamus.com/companies/tanjo/):

> Tanjo's animated personas are like Simm characters for market researchers.

https://hypepotamus.com/companies/tanjo/

**Stan Lee has a model too, I am pretty curious whether he can create new comics. Can he? 😊**

## The rebirth of the most important person

The story has a **very heartwarming twist, Richard resurrected his father.** He is talking to him almost every day.

As **his father was not present on social media he had to do a lot of manual work.** He digitalized all his letters, military documents, ...

Richard were taking about **many other interesting things like X-Prize** where he **participated** with his team in the **Pandemic Respone Competition with their Social distancing simulator which can simulate how people feel and act.** They were so successful t **hey could go till the the finals. Congratulations.**

## QA

There was a **very insightful QA section** at the end of the speech, I brought you the ones I found most exciting:

**Q** : In the **social distancing simulation** where we are **trying to understand user's feelings** about action, **what is the data being used?** Synthetic or actual user data? **A** : **Modeling humans is complex as we are complex.** They are using a sort of **data fusion model.** You should s **tart with demographic data** as it is easy to collect. But it is not enough, **you need their activity. What they are doing with they money and time.**

In Seth Stephens-Davidowitz book [Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AFXZ2F4) he explains that basically **everybody lies** on some level (I have not read it yet, but it is definitely on my reading list) but **you cannot lie to your bank. They have the data.**

**Q** : You mentioned recreating people as an AI model called Personas. **What was your first feelings when you talked to your father?**

**A** : It is a shadow model of my father. **On his birthday, I can visit him. We had disagreements about life and politics and I am still arguing with him.** 😊

**Q** : When you are teaching artificial intelligence (like a Stan Lee persona), **are you concerned with the data input from a morality angle like how to avoid teaching them bad behaviour/language?**

**A** : Always. Biggest issue. **First thought of any Data Scientist is to give me all the data.** As much as I can get.

For example, whenever you are training an automated vehicle you want data about every single thing a vehicle can encounter in the world.

At the **Department of Defense of the United States, they are doing validation and verification** (VNV) They check all the data, they validate and verify them.

It is **very important to screen for bias in data**. For example **historic data of legal issues are already biased by the views of the actual historical period.**

And that was the final QA. **Thanks for reading.** 😊

I heard that the **presentations are recorded** so they will be available after the conference, but **it is highly possible you have to buy the ticket to access them**. **I am not sure about that.**

As I promised **I will post about other speeches** which I found the most insightful in the upcoming days, but I am not sure whether I will hear more astounding things than this speech.

To close the article, I would like to leave you here a question:

**In case you could resurrect one person who would it be?**

**Spread the word and share this article!** 😊

In case you do **not want to miss my posts** , just **follow me** [here on Hashnode](https://mszeles.com/), on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/miklos-szeles/), on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mszeles) on [Medium.com](https://medium.com/@mszeles), on [dev.to](https://dev.to/mszeles) and even on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/szelesmiki/). 😊

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