James & BO
My good friend James was born on Tuesday 13 July 1993, in Liverpool, with no skin on his feet and one of his hands. It turned out he had epidermolysis bullosa (EB), a rare genetic condition that causes the skin to tear, blister, and become as fragile as the wings of a butterfly — which is why sufferers are sometimes called 'Butterfly Children'.
James and I first met in 2016. James had seen a video of a talk I gave at the British Museum. It had been a big year for him. Not only had he undergone gruelling treatment for his cancer, but his sister Gemma had told him that she was pregnant with a boy she was to call Tommy.
James confided in me that he'd really struggled with his mortality at that point in his life. He wanted his nephew to know Uncle James, but he didn't know how long he had left.
'My mind is a form of physical energy. I believe that. It will eventually transform to the point where I don't need it to be in this stupid body any more. You probably don't understand what I mean. But basically I think I'll just be something different.'
We decided we needed a way to record as much of James as possible, and we cooked up a plan to create a digital 'time capsule' of James's thoughts and memories for Tommy. To capture them, I installed several smart speakers — first Amazon Echos, then Google Homes — in James's house.
Quickly the devices recorded huge quantities of audio. But instead of simply keeping these recordings for posterity, we used them to create what in the Ai world is known as a 'corpus' — a body of knowledge from which a machine can learn — and fed it into an algorithm to help us understand James better.
At that point we hadn't thought about the implications of what we were doing. We were just two guys having fun with technology.
Things took an unexpected twist when on 12 July 2017, James and I gave a talk at a tech event at the London College of Fashion. Across the room, James spotted a 3ft-high robot, which its designers called Bo. For James, it was the moment when the project went from collecting as many thoughts in his head as possible, to something far more extraordinary. Read more here.
