A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality (2017)

https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/

by EndXA • 7 years ago

175 115 7 years ago

Etheryte2• 7 years ago

I'm really, really torn on this. On one hand, this is an amazing way to immortalize memories, experience, whole lifetimes of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. On the other, it feels like a severe form of escapism and refusal to move on.

salex89• 7 years ago

Try watching the movie About Time, from 2013. In short the main character can travel through time to visit his passing father... Until a point. Sound creepy, but actually isn't. A very wholesome movie.

Etheryte2• 7 years ago

I've seen the movie, and enjoyed it immensely, I don't think the ideas from the movie wholly apply here though.

ikeboy• 7 years ago

Interesting movie but they couldn't make up their minds about what the rules were. Every stated rule was broken when convenient.

MrGilbert• 7 years ago

On the other, it feels like a severe form of escapism and refusal to move on.

There is nothing wrong with it. People deal differently, I guess. I, for myself, would have loved to have something similiar from my parents. Not a whole chatbot, but... Written down and audible memories. The tech is there, just the opportunity wasn't.

jfk13• 7 years ago

Yeah... this doesn't appeal to me at all (speaking as someone who lost one parent a few years ago, and sees the other growing frailer), but if he wants to use this form to capture and share memories, I guess that's fine.

My main gripe is with the headline phrase "Artificial Immortality". It's so far removed from that as to be laughable.

(The subtitle about "re-create his dad as an AI" seems severely over-hyped, too, although I suppose that's true of most uses of the term "AI".)

walterstucco2• 7 years ago

There is nothing wrong with it

Actually there is.

People deal differently with the loss, but eventually they all get over it, because it is a natural process.

A severe refusal to move on is not what one can call a good thing.

Think about the people around you and the consequences it could have.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

"At first, many Native Americans were wary of having their photographs taken and often refused. They believed that the process could steal a person's soul and disrespected the spiritual world.

Over time, however, some Native Americans came to cherish photographs as links to ancestors and even integrated them into important ceremonies."

cryptofits2• 7 years ago

Somehow, this title gave me goosebump in a way the end of Inception gave me

Great idea for a movie

yulaow• 7 years ago

A similar idea moved a bit further is the theme of the film Transcendence

davedx• 7 years ago

You should totally watch Source Code, it's a much deeper dive on this subject. Great movie.

cryptofits2• 7 years ago

Will do ;)

ginko• 7 years ago

There's a black mirror episode based on this.

pteraspidomorph• 7 years ago

Here it is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

siberianbear• 7 years ago

This is also a sub-plot of the television series Caprica, where a researcher uses her daughter as the model for the first true AI in a robot cylon.

kebman2• 7 years ago

Caprica is actually a very good series, often forgotten in the shadow of Battlestar Galactica. But then it doesn't really feature cool spaceships. ;)

deftnerd• 7 years ago

For a comedic version of this concept, check out the fake infomercial "Live Forever as You Are Now" (1)

Great example of the promise of virtual immorality done badly with bad software

(1) https://youtu.be/xg29TuWo0Yo

ozzmotik3• 7 years ago

alan resnick and wham city comedy make some absolutely brilliant content! thank you for sharing this, I forgot all about it.

gt2• 7 years ago

Might be interesting to combine with the latest advancements in voice synthesis[0,1,2]. Actually, surprised they didn't delve into those possibilities.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182262

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819672

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858246

keiferski• 7 years ago

This topic reminds me of an Ebert review of Solaris (2002):

The genius of Lem's underlying idea is that the duplicates, or replicants, or whatever we choose to call them, are self-conscious and seem to carry on with free will from the moment they are evoked by the planet. Rheya, for example, says, "I'm not the person I remember. I don't remember experiencing these things." And later, "I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me." In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was.

The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/solaris-2002

I think it is a deep mistake to correlate one's exterior appearance and behavior with a sense of selfhood. At best, it's a shallow surface imitation of the actual person. At worst, it creates a nightmarish, Uncanny Valley-esque simulacrum, not unlike Harlow's wire monkey mother surrogates. It would be better to learn how to accept and deal with loss - a reality that everyone inevitably faces.

duxup2• 7 years ago

In the end of Solaris (at least the American version) it seems the protagonist chooses the illusion.

Right or wrong perhaps the illusion is enough / or all we really know.

walterstucco2• 7 years ago

The movie's finale (both) is not what happen in the book.

In the book Kelvin accepts that he's standing in front of a godlike creature that the human mind will never understand, he surrender, lands on the planet's surface hoping that "time of cruel miracles was not past".

The acceptance is not of the illusion itself, but of the fact that we would never understand the whys, the rational thinking and scientific positivism have become the real illusion, all is lost, Solaris won, there is only the hope that Solaris will keep making "cruel miracles".

danidiaz• 7 years ago

    "And yet, if only from my dreams when I was asleep, I might have
    learned that my grief for my grandmother's death was diminishing, for
    she appeared in them less crushed by the idea that I had formed of her
    non-existence. I saw her an invalid still, but on the road to
    recovery, I found her in better health. And if she made any allusion
    to what she had suffered, I stopped her mouth with my kisses and
    assured her that she was now permanently cured. I should have liked to
    call the sceptics to witness that death is indeed a malady from which
    one recovers. Only, I no longer found in my grandmother the rich
    spontaneity of old times. Her words were no more than a feeble, docile
    response, almost a mere echo of mine; she was nothing more than the
    reflexion of my own thoughts."
    —Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain

texuf• 7 years ago

"And yet, if only from my dreams when I was asleep, I might have learned that my grief for my grandmother's death was diminishing, for she appeared in them less crushed by the idea that I had formed of her non-existence. I saw her an invalid still, but on the road to recovery, I found her in better health. And if she made any allusion to what she had suffered, I stopped her mouth with my kisses and assured her that she was now permanently cured. I should have liked to call the sceptics to witness that death is indeed a malady from which one recovers. Only, I no longer found in my grandmother the rich spontaneity of old times. Her words were no more than a feeble, docile response, almost a mere echo of mine; she was nothing more than the reflexion of my own thoughts." —Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain

gonehome• 7 years ago

There's a similar plot in the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" (from an earlier season when it was still UK only).

amelius• 7 years ago

If this catches on then at a certain moment there will be more bots than real people.

antisthenes• 7 years ago

Hosted in a data center, living lives in San Junipero no less.

peteradio• 7 years ago

Solving captchas to keep their rankly old bits flipping..

Kaibeezy2• 7 years ago

I zinged straight to (what is for me) the ultimate question in these matters: When will I be able to upload my mind and have it function fully in machina?

Alas, still (for practical purposes) never.

Why you’ll never be able to upload your brain to the cloud - https://theconversation.com/why-youll-never-be-able-to-uploa...

tim3333• 7 years ago

The article seems a bit pessimistic to me. Ok we neither know how the brain stores information, nor are able to make a human level AI currently, both of which would have to happen before uploading was feasible but research is progressing rapidly on both fronts. Personally I'd expect it to be possible before the century is out.

There's already a YC startup working on the stuff https://nectome.com/ who seem to have had some ups and downs but it's early days. Here's the Daily Mail on Sam Altman signing up https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5503045/Tech-billio...

kebman2• 7 years ago

What will it matter? You'll still be dead. Will your machine likeness be anything like you, except in simulation? Or will it simply be an empty Chinese room, giving your loved ones a doll-shell to hold onto, like in a cruel Harry Harlow experiment?

jvagner• 7 years ago

I think if you could upload your mind and interact, a la Speaker for the Dead, it would be more than just your doll she’ll getting interacted with.

I’m Buddhist, I work on my acceptance of death. Sometimes it feels deceptively easy, and sometimes I look at my son and pre ache for what won’t be. Uploading my thoughts for him to review isn’t tempting to me, just like cloning my dog won’t give me my dog. But I get the temptation to wish we were close to a time where it felt plausible. But I don’t expect it to be.

meowface• 7 years ago

It would matter if true consciousness transfer turns out to actually be theoretically possible. First we have to figure out creating a near-perfect replica (give that a few centuries, at least, probably) and what substrates it could be implanted into, and then if it's possible to really retain subjective self-continuity. Non-transfered replicas will also each feel like they have continuity, so this is a difficult problem, but there's still a lot that needs to be understood before we can definitively rule the possibility in or out.

If the former is possible but not the latter, then I agree it isn't really very interesting. It's just a new way to spawn intelligent lifeforms, but we'll surely have many ways to do that by then. But I feel like if we can actually crack that, then we can eventually crack the second problem, too. The most popular hypothesis seems to be a Ship of Theseus-style gradual replacement / transition for some level of granularity (perhaps individual atoms, molecules, or neurons). We're fundamentally in the dark in so many ways at the moment that it seems unclear if these are plausible, obvious, or absurd.

Possible in the lifetimes of anyone reading this today? No (even if longevity breakthroughs accelerate like crazy). But if human or human-derived intelligence is still around in 1000, 100,000, 100,000,000 years from now, it's impossible to speculate what we may be capable of. If colonizing millions of galaxies becomes a boring walk in the park (via self-propagating autonomous constructs, for instance), then moving your consciousness to different tenancies while fully preserving your original self doesn't seem that insane. Maybe future "humans" will even skip the "middleman" (literally) and just be "born" directly into a non-biological housing from the start so that the transfer step won't be necessary, and maybe the "A" in AGI will become a non-sequitur.

Kaibeezy2• 7 years ago

Ideally, uploaded to Konishi polis.

http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

tim3333• 7 years ago

Each day the you that gets up is slightly different to the one that went to sleep. You could make the same argument - what does it matter - the yesterday you is gone, why bother with the new one. I think the reason to bother is that life is kind of cool whether traditional or perhaps AI enhanced.

WalterBright4• 7 years ago

That's why I'll never get in the Star Trek transporter. It takes you apart into information, then reconstructs you somewhere else. But it reconstructs a clone of you - you are dead. The clone believes the transporter works perfectly, and the clone was transported.

But the original you is no more.

AnIdiotOnTheNet9• 7 years ago

This is a very narrow and naive view of self. If I removed part of your brain would you still be you? It happens to people all the time, personalities are sometimes altered, yet we don't consider these people to be a different person. You yourself have undergone tremendous change since you were a child, yet we do not consider the child-you to be dead and the present-you to be a different being.

Why then, should a being even more like you than a previous version of yourself not be considered the same person?

Self is illusion. We are a collection of energy swirling in the great sea of energy we call the world, forming for a brief time a pattern that believes itself to be separate from that which comprises it, and of which it in turn is a part.

jcims2• 7 years ago

I don't know if it came from a dream or what, but I've had this scene in my mind where you're looking at the screen on a machine, and in the reflection of that screen you can see doctors milling around a subject on a table. In unison they all turn their heads to the screen and you see words and shit flicker on it, faster and faster until it's evident that a consciousness is booting up in the machine. A few seconds later you hear a voice coming from the machine like someone waking up from being knocked out. It's the person on the table and the docs are talking to him. The guy slowly gets his bearings and starts celebrating that it worked and he's saying how amazing it is and he feels like his mind is infinite.

Then as the scene starts to go dark you hear a meek voice from the table rise over the din and say 'hey Doc, i don't think it worked'.

Splines• 7 years ago

Check out the video game "Soma". It's a horror-themed game but you can play in "Safe" mode if that's not your thing. I'd say more but that would spoil things for you.

titzer• 7 years ago

How do you plan to pay the rent? (i.e. whoever owns the computational power needed to run your mind)

enra• 7 years ago

Anyone interested in fiction, Stephenson's new book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" explores this concept and computational power needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell

shadowprofile774• 7 years ago

Some thoughts I've had on these details and a few points I think are worth mentioning:

First: we have to be careful about comparing mental/physical states like sleep or even deep comatose unconsciousness with notions of mind/body replacement and revival of consciousness. I say this because it's possible that extremely subtle processes might be at work in the former two states that do indeed give us a continuity of perception of same self which wouldn't be the case if you perfectly copied someone and then destroyed them in the instant of reanimating the new perfect copy.

second: for the above i'm not even really taking into consideration the possibility of consciousness being a a partly quantum phenomenon that's impossible to emulate, clone or copy in any way that really recreates the original person's self into a new substrate

Third: assuming we can actually perform whole mind emulation, cloning of a new body and transfer of a self into a new physical or digital substrate (that the brain is capable of being perfectly recreated as if it truly were the original in terms of all functional, practical measurements and subject perception), this still has to keep in mind the danger of what I call uncopied tail end consciousness in the original. In other words, if a person's original self even for a split second or two perceives consciousness beyond the moment of emulation, then truly, they will die and with a knowledge of the copy being just a copy, separate from them, But if on the other hand the transition of consciousness can be made totally seamless as far as perception is concerned, or graduated to that the two gently merge into a new copy, then it would really possibly be possible to create a continuous, clean perception of self.

Fourth, as a tangent of Third. One idea I've always had is of conscious perception having a granular quality, in that we can perceive increments of self awareness/time down to some fraction of a second, and any emulation process would have to create a "backup" for emulation to a new copy at a rate just slightly faster than that natural granularity of perception in order to give us seamless continuity of self-perception in case the original has to suddenly be destroyed and the new copy of your consciousness reanimated.

sysbin• 7 years ago

I think death isn't bad when you think about infinity. The universe can repeat the same occurrences needed for what made our life and where the exact same conditions happen again for having the actions & thoughts we already lived. Eternal reoccurrence is the name. Theoretical physics even has it make more sense if the universe continuously expands & retracts repetitively. Thus I would rather just die while in tremendous pain from an illness and where it would appear instant for my conscious to appear again once the forces of the universe repeat the needed conditions.

ozzmotik3• 7 years ago

ah yes. assuming the universe does operate in a cyclical manner and that consciousness itself is an actual fundamental feature of the universe (and not just emergent) , it certainly does make sense from a logical perspective that eventually there will be a beginning that matches the configuration of our current universe and evolves over time such that an Earth will exist again and the consciousness we inhabit will be reborn in the same manner it was leading to our ability to experience it this go round :)

tyingq• 7 years ago

Does Pullstring save (or export) all of this metadata into something that can work on a different platform?

I wonder about the chances of all this work being lost.

Edit: Story was from 2017, Apple acquired them in Feb 2019, and Pullstring's site is now gone, though a few pages remain in the Google cache. Sounds like there is some risk.

qrybam• 7 years ago

Black Mirror covered something a few steps beyond this in the episode called “San Junipero” [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero

malydok• 7 years ago

I find the "Be Right Back" episode to be more directly fitting here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

ticklemyelmo• 7 years ago

It's definitely more applicable. The simulacrum literally starts off as a chat bot.

dwighttk• 7 years ago

The difference between his recordings of 91,970 words, the books of those words bound, and the Dadbot are merely format differences.

Sure he added (and subtracted) some stuff programming the bot, but there is no AI here.

markus_zhang2• 7 years ago

Should I pass my mind/memory by value, or by reference? Which one is more expensive?

sooheon3• 7 years ago

By value, and definitely onto better storage.

MauranKilom• 7 years ago

Probably by value, unless you want to risk that it ends up dangling...

markus_zhang2• 7 years ago

Might want to run advanced algorithms in my brain maybe...

_iyig• 7 years ago

Ray Kurzweil of “A.I. Singularity” fame has collected his deceased father’s writings and possessions for a similar attempt at mechanical reanimation:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-brin...

failrate• 7 years ago

Rudy Rucker discusses a project like this in the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. Remarkable that someone has actually tried to do it.

sabujp• 7 years ago

One could take lots of videos of a person, get a large corpus of their phrases, sentences, behaviors, use deepfakes to generate videos, profit

lavezzi• 7 years ago

I think that's the plot of that Black Mirror episode, Be Right Back.

AllegedAlec• 7 years ago

For those interested in stories about stuff like this: Malagash by Joey Comeau.

Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything. She’s recording every single “I love you” right alongside every “Could we turn the heat up in here?” It’s all important.

Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She has thousands of lines of code to write. Cryptography to understand. Exploits to test. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.

50656E6973• 7 years ago

I wonder if it occurred to the son how much more of his father's consciousness lives on in himself?

A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality (2017)

Related Stories