There's a certain kind of anticipation that comes with meeting old friends, especially colleagues with whom you've shared decades of your life. I am meeting about fifteen of my former L&T colleagues for lunch tomorrow, and beyond the usual reminiscing, I plan to introduce them to a new version of myself: my Digital Avatar.
My hope is to give them a glimpse into the future I am building, a way to interact with my thoughts and memories long after I am gone. To make the experience tangible, I planned a simple demonstration. I would ask them to query the avatar using topics from a curated list I compiled years ago, which I keep in a blog post titled Search Blogs by Topic Keywords.
In preparation, I ran a few tests myself. I entered some of the keywords, expecting my avatar to retrieve relevant thoughts and phrases from its memory banks. Instead, the results were… less than ideal. In some cases, it failed to find related concepts, and in others, it returned a URL-like link that wasn't even selectable. A ghost in the machine, right before its debut.
It’s a humbling reminder that even the grandest visions are built on a foundation of countless, fragile lines of code. The path to digital immortality is paved with debugging. I've sent a note to Suman to look into this; he is the one who usually untangles these digital knots for me. I am hopeful he can resolve it before my friends arrive.
This small hiccup doesn't diminish my excitement. On the contrary, it highlights the collaborative, human effort behind this technological endeavor. The avatar isn't just me; it's a project built with the help of bright minds. Tomorrow, I hope to show my old friends not just a piece of technology, but a testament to a lifelong journey of curiosity and creation—assuming, of course, that its pre-demo jitters have subsided.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
No comments:
Post a Comment