When death do us part: AI-enabled immortality and the merits of letting go

On a holiday a few years ago, my husband and I were driving around purposelessly with some friends, with their son and our daughter sitting in the rearmost seat, chatting away. We pricked up our ears when we heard the children talking about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Their son, who was still short of 10 and about four years younger than our daughter, declared that he’d become an inventor. This is what he said he intended to invent: A machine that would allow a person to speak with loved ones who were dead and gone. What he had in mind was something rooted in science, and not some Ouija board kind of stuff.

“When we are older and our parents are dead, with that machine we will be able to create their image (like a hologram) and talk to them when we miss them,” he said. It was an innocent, smart, sensitive — and incredibly sad — thought, one that also made us acutely aware of our mortality that beautiful spring afternoon.

Last week, something along the lines of what he’d thought of in fact played out in a South Korean documentary, Meeting You, which recreated a dead seven-year-old girl for a “meeting” with her mother. The child had died of leukaemia in 2016 and a digital avatar of hers had been created with the help of her photographs and her mother’s memories of her. The reunion was made possible with the mother wearing virtual reality goggles. It is a heart-wrenching video of a woman, tears streaming down her face, reaching out to touch her little girl who she knows is but an illusion that has come running towards her. Though the video has triggered a debate about voyeurism and the exploitation of emotions, the mother has said that even though it was brief, she was really happy in that moment.

A South Korean documentary recreated a dead seven-year-old for a ‘meeting’ with her mother

It turns out that there’s another technology out there that is attempting to “communicate” with the dead, and even immortalise them. A start-up called Eterni.me, for instance, is inviting people to become “virtually immortal” by sharing with it their thoughts, stories and memories so that it can create an intelligent digital avatar that thinks and communicates like them and lives forever. Another one, called Replika, was born out of the memory of a man who was killed in an accident while crossing a street in Moscow. After his death his friend collected thousands of his text messages to create a bot, which, besides being eerily like him, could not only remember past events but also have fresh conversations in the present, thanks to artificial intelligence. The technology that made this possible is now available in the form of a chatbot called Replika, which allows anyone to create digital versions of themselves. The more you tell this chatbot about yourself (or of the person you want replicated), the better it gets to know you and the more closely it is able to replicate you.

Though my first instinct was to recoil and reject as bizarre these AI-enabled apps and technologies that try to immortalise people or keep loved ones alive, there is no denying that these are incredible developments. Imagine being able to preserve someone’s knowledge and deploy AI to have that very person’s digital avatar build on it.

Mourning the loss of all that was gone with his father when he died, a former colleague once said, “His wisdom, knowledge, the answers he would have to so many questions, all went with him. If only there were a pen drive in which I could have saved all of that.”

Well, there seems to be such a possibility now. But then with possibilities, there are also no limits — and, therefore, no telling where they might lead us. Some people you want to hold on to. Others you cannot help but be relieved that they are gone for good, and their ideas too. Dictators, radicals. Would we want them to have the power of immortality?

And then there is also a reason why human beings are wired to forget, to remember some things and not everything. We’d go mad if we didn’t. So it is a mad idea to try and create a world that will not allow us to forget. A world where we no longer feel the need to look inwards to draw on our personal memories of someone who might have passed. Where technology does that for us.

How will these illusions affect us humans? I can’t say. Perhaps some realms are best left unexplored. There is something to be said about letting go.

veenu.sandhu@bsmail.in