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Interviews Digital ghosts, the faces of the future Peter Cochrane doesn't look like a time traveller. He's fifty-something, wears a navy suit and a subdued tie. The only giveaway is a Dick Tracey-style watch that allows him to monitor his heart rate and relay it back to Britain for analysis, several times a day. The watch is part of a remote health diagnostics experiment that will allow those who have suffered a mild heart attack or stroke to be regularly monitored from wherever they are, rather than taking up an expensive hospital bed. Compared with most of Cochrane's research, the watch is very mundane. The head of 660 researchers at British Telecom's UK Laboratories, Cochrane describes himself as "living 10 years ahead of other people's lives". In his book Tips for Time Travellers he predicts there will come a time when some people will prefer to have a silicon chip implanted under their skin than to have to wait in line to get a stamp in their passport, a new driving licence or to pay for their shopping. "Look at the number of young girls with tattoos. That's quite acceptable," he said. Cochrane also says in his book that many people are quite happy to pay vast amounts for silicone implants. "One material is inert and safe, the other [has] very definite risks," he said. In Australia recently to brief BT corporate customers on the latest technologies, Cochrane claimed that while devices such as the ECG watch can help save lives, his lab was also working on technologies that would preserve "life" after death - or at least intelligence, mannerisms and personality. As more people use computers, the Internet and digital TV for work and entertainment and as digital storage capacity becomes dirt-cheap and effectively unlimited, he predicts people will start to create databases of their entire lives. "They'll do it for themselves," he said. They'll save ideas, e-mail, years worth of documents they have read and maybe written, their favourite films, music, photographs. Soeven when they die, this digital imprint of their knowledge, ideas and interests will remain. "Einstein came and went, we cut up his brain but found nothing, the intelligence had gone," said Cochrane. The artificial life and artificial intelligence products that Cochrane's lab is working on will allow these digital "ghosts" to be converted to "avatars" - photorealistic, 3-D models that will be able to mimic the mannerisms and even the style of speech of their late-creators. The laboratory has already patented a system for applying photographs of individual human faces to complex computer models. And, according to Cochrane, lip movements have been synchronised so realistically that avatar speech can be lip-read by the deaf. Eventually, Cochrane predicts we will be able to meet with the avatars of people, dead and alive, via "inhabited TV" - artificial environments that could be broadcast via television. His laboratory has already carried out one inhabited TV trial with Channel Four in Britain, where more than 100 viewers were online, as very basic avatars, at any one time. Cochrane expects these avatars to play increasingly busy roles in daily life, representing us in places we can't get to in person. He showed a video of a typical business meeting in 2010. Two men were sitting at a table chatting, another two entered the room. Everything looked normal, all four were dressed similarly, all four engaged in the same friendly introductory pleasantries. The only difference was that the two who came later didn't exist in real life. A wall-sized screen displayed their life-size images to the real-life meeting. But according to Graham Cosier, the head of the Centre for Human Communications at BT Laboratories, they were part computer-generated avatar, part video. Cochrane said that another BT team was working on artificial intelligence that would allow avatars to sense and respond appropriately to the emotions of the people they were dealing with. In a decade, this could mean that when you go for a meeting with your bank manager over the continued rejection of your smartcard, the manager will be an avatar, but at least he, or she, could recognise if you were angry and try to placate you. Not all of the BT Laboratories work is so futuristic. Of the 660 research staff he manages, Cochrane said 30 per cent work on current, real-life problems - "the fire brigade". Another 30 per cent work on technologies that are three to five years out, another 30 per cent, on technologies 10 years out "and I have no idea what the other 10 per cent are up to," he said, suggesting it's too far away for even him to contemplate. One of the here-and-now research programs is a trial just started with Microsoft on Web TV - accessing the Internet via the TV. Like Gates, Cochrane sees the TV as a device vital to achieving the type of ubiquitous computing - where you can get access to the Internet as easily as you can now access the phone network - he needs to deliver his time traveller's visions. Perhaps more worrying is that Microsoft, via its own Cambridge University research laboratory in Britain, is also very much involved in BT Labs' artificial intelligence work. In 10 years the online world may be inhabited by avatars and they all may be wearing Microsoft polo shirts. |