Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

He said,"Life is a game. "

Some people are so excited about the game that they refuse to quit at the end and want to play it indefinitely. For example, Qin Shihuang always thought of panacea and immortality.

There were also some people who didn't have a good time and wanted to finish early, reincarnate, and practice again.

However, the real world is fair. No matter who you are, life is only once, neither "delay" nor reopen "copy."

Therefore, human beings began to place this beautiful wish in literature and film and television works. To put it bluntly, it was fiction.

An expert once said: "What people lack in the real world will strive to compensate in the virtual world." Fiction has always been the underlying impulse of human civilization. "

In the fictional world, if you want to live forever, you can reincarnate if you want, and occasionally you can play soul swap and time travel. It's simply wonderful.

moonlight box

Entering the late 20th century, the vigorous development of digital information technology has given people's imagination more powerful wings.

The improvement of computer software and hardware capabilities has brought cool multimedia technology and 3D graphics display technology. With the help of these technologies, film effects became more and more realistic, and computer games attracted countless players to enjoy them.

People were pleasantly surprised to find that in the fictional digital world, we can achieve "identity transformation" and "role playing."

Isn't that the classic game from EA,"The Sims," that's it? Players can create simulated citizens according to their own preferences, live in the virtual world, and experience different lives.

The Sims. Old gamer's favorite.

In addition to simple character modeling and character manipulation, there are also a small number of people who have a deeper level of thinking about the digital world. They opened a bigger brain hole--

Can we, humans, transform ourselves directly into digital forms of life and survive in computers and networks?

In 1993, the film Ghost Computer was released in the United States. In this movie, there is a serial killer who incarnates himself as a computer virus on the Internet and kills people everywhere.

The film caused a great sensation, even panic, at the time. Many people think that the human soul may really be able to wander around along the network cable.

Keanu Reeves 'classic film The Matrix was released in 1999, bringing attention to the digital world to a climax.

One of the most classic shots in human history.

After entering the 21st century, information technology continues to make great strides forward. The emergence of cloud computing and big data technology and the continuous improvement of chip manufacturing process have raised the computing power level of human society to a higher level and laid the foundation for the rise of two key technologies.

These two key technologies are digital twins and artificial intelligence.

Everyone is familiar with what digital twin artificial intelligence is. Let me briefly introduce digital twins.

Digital twins are called digital twins. Simply put, it is based on a physical entity, through digital technology, to create a virtual, digital version of the "clone."

Digital twins are not simple 3D modeling. 3D modeling replicates only the shape, while digital twins replicate not only the shape but also the dynamic information of the entity and the external environment.

In other words, digital twins move. It can realize "dynamic simulation" of ontology according to sensor data and historical operation data of ontology.

Digital twins were first proposed, not to create "digital life," but to serve the field of industrial manufacturing.

In March 2011, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory explicitly mentioned digital twins for the first time in an effort to improve fighter aircraft maintenance. GE and Siemens quickly followed suit, applying it to industrial digitalization to improve the development and design of industrial products.

Soon, it moved from the industrial field to infrastructure engineering, transportation logistics, urban governance and many other industries, becoming a hot technology that people are eager to pursue.

At the Beijing Winter Olympics held earlier this year, digital twinning technology was on display.

Based on its own VSS digital twin venue simulation service, Intel digitized, dynamically and three-dimensionally 12 competition venues, 3 Olympic villages and main media centers of Beijing Winter Olympic Games through virtual reality, computer graphics and other related cutting-edge technologies, realizing the first application of digital twin technology in Winter Olympic Games.

This system provides accurate simulation of the interior, exterior and activity elements of the venue, and uses twin virtual three-dimensional worlds to assist the operation of the real world, greatly reducing the workload of staff on-site survey and review, simplifying the construction and management process of the venue, and providing strong support for ensuring the success of the Winter Olympic Games as scheduled.

Digital cloning: the first experience of digital intelligent life Digital twins and the rise of artificial intelligence technology, coupled with the advancement of 3D graphics technology, once again aroused the impulse of human beings to create digital life.

Traditional digital personas, every move is designed (drawn) out, dialogue content is fixed. Now that we have more advanced technology, can we make it smarter and more realistic?

And so digital people were created.

Digital people are still virtual people created on top of digital systems. As mentioned earlier, it differs from traditional digital personas in that it has a certain intelligence.

With the help of knowledge atlas and artificial intelligence technology, digital people can train massive data based on video, audio, text and other real behavior information by means of machine learning, so as to behave more like real people.

Because of this, we can also call digital people "digital clones"(hereinafter referred to as "digital people").

Digital Man can be traced back to 2007, based on the Text To Speech program developed sound library_"First Sound Future." At that time, the relevant technology was not mature, so digital people basically appeared in the image of the second dimension.

In 2016, artificial intelligence virtual anchor "tripping love" was born, setting off a new upsurge of digital people. In 2021, after the concept of meta-universe fire, digital people became the tuyere, attracting countless enterprises and capital chase.

According to statistics, there are currently more than 30,000 digital people worldwide. These digital people are widely used in education and training, financial insurance, medical health, classroom propaganda, games, e-commerce and other fields, serving as virtual customer service, virtual tour guide, virtual host, virtual anchor and other roles.

Customer service digital person of a bank

These virtual people don't eat or drink, don't sleep, don't ask for leave, don't take wages, don't jump ship, can 007 every day, deeply welcomed by enterprises. There are also many enterprises that even use digital people as their own brand spokesmen, greatly reducing the risk of "rollover."

It should be noted that digital people are characters created based on digital technology. Therefore, the level of digital technology will make a big difference to the experience of digital people.

In other words, the more advanced the digital technology, the stronger the digital people.

This is easy to understand, the stronger the AI algorithm and computing power, the stronger the digital person will be, and eventually pass the Turing test.

Digital people also rely heavily on cloud computing technology.

Cloud is the carrier of computing power, which is one of the three core elements of AI (computing power, algorithm and data). Today, almost all enterprise digital systems (including digital people systems) are deployed in cloud data centers.

Therefore, providing strong cloud data center technical support is also the key to ensuring the smooth development of digital people.

To create a good digital person, of course, in the movement of appearance and appearance should also be realistic.

A lot of the movements of digital people are based on the capture and collection of real people's movements. Intel's 3DAT (3D Athlete Tracking) is a representative of this technology.

3DAT technology can extract key skeleton points (rotation angle and angular velocity of core joints, knee joints and hip joints) and pose trajectory information of real people through AI algorithm, carry out 3D reconstruction, and accurately capture every detail posture of real people.

This technique was successfully used at the Beijing Winter Olympics to help athletes improve their movements. At the opening ceremony, this technology was also used to capture the actor's position and posture data in real time, interacting with the large screen, and performing an excellent viewing effect.

There is still a lot of technical empowerment in the field of digital people.

For example, CGI animation of facial features and expressions requires a lot of simulation and rendering work, and also requires strong computing support.

In short, cloud computing, graphics processing, artificial intelligence and other computing related technologies are the basis for the development of digital people.

Digital Immortality: Exploring the Future of Digital Intelligent Life Digital human technology has achieved great success, but it is not the end of the digital life exploration.

In addition to appearance, behavior, and knowledge, we need two of the most important and difficult factors to create the ultimate digital life, namely emotion and self-awareness.

Emotion is the most complex human trait. It has both innate and acquired elements. Long life experiences, decades of memories, shape a person's emotions. It's hard to replicate emotions in an artificial intelligence way.

In recent years, several very popular film and television works about digital life are all about artificial intelligence emotion and self-awareness awakening. For example, Dolores for "Westworld," Guy for "Runaway Player."

In addition to artificial intelligence self-awakening, there is also a theoretically feasible way to collect, save and transplant human brain information-through a "brain information collector (similar to brain-computer interface technology)", continuously scan and extract human brain information, and store this information.

The American drama "Upload New Life" adopts this kind of thinking. In the play, Nathan, the protagonist, is seriously injured in a car accident and uploads his consciousness to the cloud to continue living in the digital world.

This opens up a whole new field-digital immortality.

Digital immortality should be the ultimate form of digital life, that is, the "ultimate digital twin" with ontology thought.

Let's imagine even more boldly: years down the road, we'll extract DNA and create an actual clone. Then, store the brain information and consciousness into it to produce emotions. Isn't that rebirth?

In fact, cloning an actual human through DNA technology is currently feasible.

However, all countries in the world prohibit such behavior on legal and ethical grounds. Clone digital human, at present just said "brain information collector" is not mature, can not do, so, there are gaps in the law.

So, what if we can do it in the future? What rights do digital twins in the digital world have? Can we get married? Can inheritance be inherited?

Think about it for a moment, it's all a headache.

In fact, we might as well ask ourselves: What is the significance of digital cloning of a person and thus digital immortality?

Xiao Zaojun feels that this problem needs to be viewed from two angles.

First of all, from the perspective of the person concerned, cloning himself may be out of the instinct of the living body to continue its own DNA. If there are no children, it hopes to change its way to continue to exist in this world.

From the perspective of relatives and friends, creating clones should be for remembrance and commemoration.

I personally think: artificial intelligence again intelligent, it is not human; digital twin again lifelike, it is not true.

Instead of indulging in the virtual world, why not better grasp the precious time and emotional relationship in reality? As living beings, isn't it sometimes a relief to bravely let a relationship end?

Well, that's all for today's article.

All in all, we still have a long way to go in the face of digital cloning and digital immortality.

At this stage, our main task is to build a stronger digital infrastructure and store information and intelligent technologies to lay the foundation for future dream exploration.

What will happen in the future? Let time tell us.

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