Immortality Through Artificial Intelligence

 

by Pa Rock

Typing Fool

We age on a daily basis, and as we age those days seem to rush by faster and faster, until, of course, that day when we reach the end of the line and quit aging.  Up until the day we quit aging some of us worry about getting our house and our lives in order so as to leave as little mess as possible for others to deal with - and some don't.   I come down on the side of those who would like to leave things orderly.

I haven't accomplished much in the way of great feats that will tie me to the historical record, other than helping to produce three capable offspring who have all themselves reproduced thus ensuring the my genetics should be sloshing around as the planet encompasses a few more thousand spins around the sun.  

But a lot of what I did accomplish beyond replicating my genetic code involved writing.  Over the course of my life I have typed millions of words into newspaper and magazine articles, stories, plays, family tree history, tweets, and this blog.  

I have been banging away at Pa Rock's Ramble for more than sixteen years, and almost every day of that time posting an entry.   Today's entry is number 6,065 in that effort (plus one that was pulled down by Google for being "inappropriate" a decade or so after it had been originally posted).  Some of those entries were  creative efforts (stories, poems, etc), and many were recaps of news stories interlaced with doses of personal opinion.   Some dwelt on personal memories, and others were factual accounts of my family history which I gleaned through personal research.  The Ramble  covered a lot of ground.  A couple of dozen of the entries were written by guest bloggers, but even on each of those I usually attached a few lines of introduction or summation which gave some illumination to my own thoughts on the matter.

Pa Rock's Ramble has come to reflect a huge chunk of who I am, and as my life edged nearer the finish line, I began to have concerns about ways to preserve all of that work.  Could it be packed away in a "cloud" somewhere, or saved to some type of storage device.  I had my doubts that Google, who owns "Blogspot" where I publish, would ever just toss that amount of writing away, but would they leave it accessible to my descendants or perhaps to researchers who might want to use it in studying social or political history during the early 21st century?

I had expressed these concerns to my youngest son who, like his dad, spends way too much time at the keyboard.  Could Tim be bothered with coming up with a way to make sure that all of this work did not simply evaporate into the ether?

And then, over this past weekend, I stumbled onto an article on the internet that set my mental gears to whirring and buzzing!

An article in Politico Magazine on December 30 by Mohar Chaterjee entitled "A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People.  The Law is Powerless." seemed to provide a different option for preserving all of my typing efforts other than just in some dusty tome that might sit ignored for generations on a library shelf.

The article told the story of a noted American psychologist, Martin Seligman, who has passed on his knowledge of psychology through college teaching and the publication of numerous textbooks.  Seligman, who is eighty-one, had already outlived many of his peers in the field and he had concerns about the preservation of his legacy.  What Professor Seligman did not know was that one of his former students was at work on a project that would preserve the Seligman's work and knowledge of psychology in a most unique manner.  The former student, a Chinese national who was back home living and working in China, had crafted, along with some of his friends, a "chatbot" based on everything that the professor had ever written.  The chatbot could converse and answer questions as if it were Professor Seligman, and it would be around a long time after the professor had departed life's stage.

Professor Seligman passed the chatbot around to his wife and friends to see what they thought, and it was a hit!

Here is the link:  https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/30/ai-psychologist-chatbot-00132682

The major thrust of the story in Politico dealt with the legality of creating a chatbot from a person's work, especially without their permission, but my major takeaway from the piece was the basic premise that a person's creative life could be used as the basis for a chatbot.  What a novel concept!

Of course I saw this story as a very unique way to preserve the blog that has eaten up such a large part of my life over the past sixteen years.  What if all of that could be put into a chatbot, along with any other writings of mine that were floating around in other sources?  I saw it as a way to stretch myself into the future.   I wouldn't be around to chat with my g-g-g-granchildren in a hundred years, and they probably would not want to dig through millions of words to get my opinion on a particular topic or idea, but if there was a Pa Rock chatbot available, they could quickly access my opinion - for entertainment purposes if nothing else!

I bounced the article from Politico to Tim who quickly responded that:  1. it would be interesting to be able to have a conversation with yourself, and 2. the ability for individuals to create their very own chatbots is probably close at hand.

So that is my current bolt of excitement as 2024 begins.  I think I have just glimpsed the future, and perhaps there is a way for me to have some voice in it.  If I were a young person and computer savvy, I would be working this idea hard - preserving writing, and tweets, and family recipes, and favorite jokes, and videos, and who knows what all into some form of interactive future presence.

Immortality is almost at hand!