
A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality (2017) - EndXA
https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/
======
keiferski
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](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.

~~~
danidiaz

        "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
"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

------
Etheryte
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
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.

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

------
Kaibeezy
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...](https://theconversation.com/why-youll-never-be-able-to-upload-your-
brain-to-the-cloud-52408)

~~~
kebman
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?

~~~
WalterBright
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.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Meh. That’s what we do everyday as our body sheds old cells and grows new
ones. It’s the ship of Theseus already anyway. The me of yesterday is dead.
The me of today only believes I am the same.

~~~
shadowprofile77
Not an expert on the subject at all but to my knowledge not quite. Yes, this
applies for most cells in the body but in the case of neurons and glial cells,
they stay for decades, so in a real, practical sense, the you of yesteryear is
still the you of today right down to the cellular level where it most matters
in the brain.

~~~
godelski
Not only that, there's a difference in repairing a ship over time and swapping
out all its parts at once. I'm pretty sure most people would consider the
second scenario a new ship.

~~~
shadowprofile77
On that distinction i'm not sure I agree, if in both cases all parts of the
ship have been replaced, the difference between doing it all at once and
gradually is a semantic one, with rejection of the "new" ship as the same
thing as the old ship being more of an emotional reaction. In either case,
it's somewhat separate from what I mentioned about the cells in the brain and
how they do stay the same over decades even if others in the body change just
like the parts of the ship. Like I said though, that needs a bit of further
confirmation because the science seems a bit ambiguous on the details.

~~~
godelski
I don't think the difference is as trivial as you think. When you replace
things slowly there are shared experiences for those parts. They have
commonality among them. When you replace something instantly there is no
shared experiences or commonality.

~~~
shadowprofile77
This is an interesting point that I hadn't quite considered. Not sure how it
would apply on the scale of inanimate objects but I could see it being
relevant to a macroscopic organic system with consciousness, like our brains
and bodies.

~~~
godelski
Well the analogy was directed at macroscopic organic systems with
consciousness.

But with Theseus's ship we can see a similarity. If we had a ship, tore it
down, then built a new ship without using any parts from the old ship, every
sane person would call that a different ship. Frankly, the tearing it down
step isn't required (an important factor). Conversely, if we repair a ship
over time we do consider it the same ship. Maybe this is just personifying
objects, but these conclusions about new ship/same ship would be pretty
standard. It is why we distinguish replica and restoration.

~~~
IggleSniggle
If it were possible to swap out a ship with an “identical” replica
instantaneously (I’m not sure what the benefit would be) I think most people
on board would consider it to be the same ship. And, for that matter, it’s
relatively common for ship owners to name their ships after the prior ship
that held the same function, as if it was the same ship, even when it’s a
totally different make/model!

~~~
godelski
But instead of swap make an identical copy. You now have two ships.

------
gt2
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182262)

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819672)

2:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858246)

------
qrybam
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero)

~~~
malydok
I find the "Be Right Back" episode to be more directly fitting here.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back)

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

------
AllegedAlec
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._

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

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

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

------
dwighttk
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.

------
_iyig
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...](https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-
father-back-life/story?id=14267712)

------
tyingq
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.

------
sysbin
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.

~~~
ozzmotik
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 :)

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

Great idea for a movie

~~~
deftnerd
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](https://youtu.be/xg29TuWo0Yo)

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

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

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

~~~
peteradio
Solving captchas to keep their rankly old bits flipping..

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

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

------
50656E6973
I wonder if it occurred to the son how much _more_ of his father's
consciousness lives on in himself?

