I want to work on something that will make a person immortal. The most obvious approach would be recreating the mind (way of thinking and speaking) digitally, in a bot that could interact with other people as if it were the original human. Upon research I've found 2 startups with this goal [1], that have now seemingly disappeared.
A problem I've found is that, in conversation, we often recount our experiences (e.g. we talk about how our day went). Since the bot does nothing but respond to questions, he would have no experiences to talk about. As a solution, the bot could also have an AI agent component, for example he could watch youtube videos and play StarCraft2 against other people, and he would recount his digital experiences (much of what I talk about with my friends are digital experiences like these, that could be simulated by a bot).
My question is: what should I work on to achieve this goal? Behavior learning and language understanding are things already being developed, so maybe the most challenging part would be tuning the bot to resemble a person.
While writing this I am realizing: YouTube and facebook already do this to an extent. After you die, YouTube will still know the type of videos you like and suggest them. So if you liked political videos, this 'immortal' bot could text your friend discussing the new policy Trump implemented, as if it were you.
[1]: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/111122/20151127/humai-wants-to-download-your-consciousness-and-transfer-it-to-a-new-body-so-you-can-live-forever.htm ; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/20/eternime-immortal-chatbots-silicon-valley-startup-can-you-cheat-death