CHRIS ROPER: Soon, you won’t have to let people die
Microsoft has patented technology that will allow it to use the data of the deceased to turn them into chatbots
If you visit the website of the US patent & trademark office, you’ll find patent number 10,853,717 B2, filed on December 1 2020 by "inventors" Dustin I Abramson and Joseph Johnson jnr, on behalf of Microsoft. Its 21 pages of dense text can be boiled down to this: Microsoft has been granted a patent on technology that allows the company to resurrect dead people by taking their online and other information, and using it to turn them into artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
The patent defines a chatbot, for those of us who haven’t had the lamentable misfortune of dealing with DStv’s one on WhatsApp, as follows: "A chat robot is a conversational computer program that simulates human conversation using textual and/or auditory input channels … Chatbots are trained using data conversational dialogue samples from various users and user sessions. As such, the chatbots in these implementations represent a generic, normalised version for the personalities and attributes for the entire...
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