On “Posthuman,” from Bloomberg Originals, host Emily Chang  talks to researchers working to overcome the limits of biology, developing technologies that could cure disease, extend lifespans, and allow people to create Human-AI agents in the form of digital avatars that could outlive their physical bodies.

One of her guests is Visiting Media Lab Professor Hossein Rahnama, who discusses the potential impact of such systems, and what safeguards are necessary to protect the privacy and security of the human beings they represent. Professor Rahnama’s segment begins at the 17:45 mark. 

More about the project

We used our chronicle builders, captured the information we had publicly, her interview with Natalie Portman, Cheryl Sandberg, everything that she has done, and we formed the Chronicle using our technique called Structural Learning. 

Then our team reached out to a group Los Angeles, who are very experts in the field of facial expressing mapping, and invited them to collaborate. 

We fined tuned our models against theirs. And that's what we got. 

Think about the future of call centers. Think about the future of consultation with a doctor or a lawyer. So as part of this project, we did a lot of work to create encryption and tokenization tools that you should only activate and validate, essentially a synthetic character in a software. It is like a blue checkmark on X, it can actually tell you whether it's fake or not. 

So in this case, instead of asking questions from a large language model, you can choose your chronicle of interest, you can ask a question, you can process the graph, you can create an audit dashboard, to see how reliable that information is, and then talk to the agent. 

We are also thinking about models that you can now activate multiple chronicles, pose a question to them and just observe. 

We are thinking about and we want to learn, if a  CEO wants to present to a board of directors and want to prepare and expect what kind of questions that he or she may get asked. 

Media companies are now reaching out to us to see, 'Could this be the future of an election debate that you can have the chronicles of the politicians and ask them questions', but questions that you are interested to ask.