by Pa Rock
Elderberry
I have a short list of things that I need to get done before my Grand Exit, and so far this year I have been able to check a couple of important items off of that list. In January I penned my obituary, and while I will still probably tinker with it on occasion, the basic document is complete, and, if I go tonight, a couple of select newspapers will be receiving a very brief version of my life story as told by me, and in the manner in which I wish it preserved. I also had some inheritance issues that needed attention, and over the past month I managed to make some important adjustments that should leave less room for confusion or squabbling when I am gone.
But there are two more items weighing heavily on my mind which are directly tied to my ultimate passing. The first is funeral-related. I want a simple graveside service at a plot next to my parents at the cemetery in Noel, Missouri. There will be a stone, which I need to design and get ordered. It will contain information on me, my parents, and children that should aid family researchers a century or two from now. The only thing that I do not want at my "burial" site is me.
I have a strong desire that my body be composted and the resulting plant food be used to make the earth greener and more habitable. Pumping a body full of poisons and then burying it to slowly pollute the ground instead of fertilizing it seems like a very destructive and self-centered waste of a wonderful natural resource. If someone wanted to pour a bag of my compost over my gravesite, that would be fine, but use the rest to feed flower beds, or start an orchard, or develop an urban garden. Just let me have one last shot at being useful and making the world a better place.
Right now the composting of human remains is only legal in a handful of states, and facilities which actually perform that service are up and running in just Washington State and Colorado. I had intended to visit one in Seattle during my recent drive out west, but by the time I had the opportunity to swing on over to Seattle, I had already been lost in the urban nightmare of Calgary and was not up to another crazy city commute. However, that does not mean that I won't get it done, hopefully before this year, or I, have ended.
The other thing that weighs heavily on my mind is the preservation of this blog. The wit and wisdom of Pa Rock has been accumulating, day-by-day, in this space for almost seventeen years. I have tons of verbiage piled up here, and much of it is stuff of which I remain proud. I would like it saved.
While I don't believe that Larry Page and the gang at Alphabet would ever dispose of anything that might ultimately make them a buck, I would like to have some control over how all of my hard work is preserved and used in the future. I had originally imagined just simply saving the massive amount of writing on storage devices and passing it on to a grandchild or a library. But that would likely be lost or discarded after a generation or two. Then I heard about chatbots that specialized in certain fields or specific authors, and could answer questions based on limited and defined fields of input - and I thought "Why not put it all in a chatbot specifically geared to the accumulated "Rambles" of Pa Rock. My good friend, Ranger Bob, enhanced that vision by suggesting a chatbot and speaker within a tombstone where descendants could speak with their dead ancestor.
Silly, right?
Yesterday I saw a piece on the internet talking about almost that very thing, The article said that "ghost bots" are becoming a cottage industry in China. Ghost bots are computer representations of dead relatives that speak in the voice of the deceased and spout favorite sayings or advice from beyond the grave. They are selling for as little as a hundred dollars and reportedly providing a level of comfort to those who have lost loved ones.
The ghost bots, through artificial intelligence, use recordings of the voices of the dead relatives, often just snippets, to recreate that person's voice in standard conversation. The sayings and advice that the bots use are apparently provided by family members..
Great. Almost like a talking tombstone!
I'm not sure how much actual recording of my own voice exists, but I would think that anyone contemplating saving their personal records to a voice-generating chatbot could read some of those records into a recorder and create plenty of sounds from which artificial intelligence could go on to recreate the same voice saying any word in the English language.
It all sounds like science fiction, but it also sounds like so many Amazon packages sitting on the doorstep just waiting to be unwrapped and put together. The future is here, and now ordinary fools like me must figure out how to assemble it - as the clock goes on tick, tick, ticking.
(I no longer face the daily drudgery of working for a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't have plenty to keep my simple mind occupied!)
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