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 the algorithm that we normally us at Us Ai to create chatbots for my banking clients.

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 turn 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 for reasons of documentation, to seeing a robot that could be autonomous… that could house this stream of consciousness. I can’t remember if we ever explicitly sat down and said this could be a version of you for when you’re not here, [but] the question of consciousness was implicitly there.