Sun Kai, the co-founder of Silicon Intelligence, speaks with an AI avatar of his late mother whenever he feels stressed at work. Aowen Cao/NPR
Aowen Cao/NPR
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Whenever stress at work builds, Chinese tech executive Sun Kai turns to his mother for support. Or rather, he talks with her digital avatar on a tablet device, rendered from the shoulders up by artificial intelligence to look and sound just like his flesh-and-blood mother, who died in 2018.
“I do not treat [the avatar] as a kind of digital person. I truly regard it as a mother,” says Sun, 47, from