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Speaking to the Dead?

Suppose we were to study your thought and speech patterns, and upload a relatively primitive but deathless SIMULATION of you?

Here’s an interesting twist on the dream of uploading consciousness into an immortal, silicon-based brain: suppose we were to study your thought and speech patterns, and upload a relatively primitive SIMULATION of you — how you speak, what you think, etc. That way, future generations could have a one-way conversation with “you,” asking questions and receiving answers in your voice, in language and thoughts assembled from how you actually speak and feel. Is this, in fact, a form of Speaking to the Dead?

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37 replies on “Speaking to the Dead?”

Oh, I can’t see how ANYTHING could POSSIBLY go wrong with this. After all, AI has proven to be SO trustworthy and completely without any axes to grind. Right. AI will always reflect the worldview of its programmers, and probably worse.There is an obvious difference between an actual recording of the real person and some synthesized speculation of what the person supposedly might say.Interacting with the dead is unambiguously addressed in: Lv 19:31, 20:6, 27, Dt 18:10-12, 1 Sam 28:3, 2 Kgs 21:6, 1 Chr 10:13, 2 Chr 33:6, and Is 8:19. Even if you “really aren’t” but think (or wish) you are, you’re sailing into dangerous shoalwater.

I can certainly see where Mr. Shatner is gonna want his great grandson to know Bill Shatner. Rather than Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker or Denny Crane, the people who the kid is most likely to end up knowing.

Or Frank O’Hara on Pscych! That was fun. Showed he could take himself a little less seriously.

So, how does the program fill in the gaps of it’s knowledge of you? The questions it didn’t ask before you died? Aspects of who you were that may not be politically correct? Simple, it’s going to fall back on pre-programmed responses. So the real question is, do you really want to risk a simulation of you telling your grandson that he was born in the wrong body.

Seems like an opportunity to exert a lot of control to me. As in …

“Mom, I asked Grandpa and he says it’s OK if I don’t want to be a boy anymore.”

“Grandpa is dead, honey. I knew him when he was alive and I know he wouldn’t have said that.”

“I asked the Grandpa thing and it says I’m right. It also gave me a list of authorities to call if you won’t support my true gender.”

“Oh crap. Time to unplug the Grandpa thing and wipe it. Then we’ll see about finding you some psychological help, if that sort of thing is even still available and doesn’t just mimic the Grandpa thing.”

“They’re coming to take you away, Mom. The Grandpa thing heard your threats to both of us. You’re not allowed to do that. Sorry but you’re standing in the way of my personal growth. Have a nice time in the Gulag.”

Bill’s 10 minutes came up…..then someone in my house must have chopped a really big onion…
I lost my Dad, before that my older brother,and before that my mom. I only have my older sis left.
Many years ago, ten perhaps…
I did the exact same as Scott. Tripod, Handycam and my daughter asking questions to my Dad.

When does it stop hurting enough to go back and watch that video for the first time? Asking for a friend….

Interesting R/A. Bill I really like your 10 minutes/year take. What a boon that would be.
Over the years I have wondered what it would be like to have actually known my maternal grandfather. We don’t really know much about his early life, he never talked about it. He enlisted in the US Army in 1902 and served until 1919. He rose to rank of Captain, not so easy in those days. Captain John went on to be a fairly successful business man in Detroit. He passed away 4 years before I was born. I wonder how much I could have learned from his wisdom.

I started to do something like this way back in the 80’s.

From scratch, I wrote my own AI program. Initially, the AI didn’t know anything but it could learn about the world and about different topics only through conversations with me. When it didn’t know how to respond to something, it would ask me for help in how to respond.

Eventually, it developed a personality and outlook very similar to mine. In those days, however, memory was too limited to do this justice because it required several huge, multidimensional arrays and I was limited to a few megabytes.

My goal was to eventually build an AI model of myself so that my friends could visit and have short conversions with the “me” I left behind, after I was gone. The interaction was entirely via keyboard and screen. No graphics or generated voices.

Because I built this whole system myself, from scratch, I consider it to be a relatively legitimate representation of me, compared to a commercial product base on a hundred or thousand questions. It is something that I built that they can interact with.

Unfortunately, it was built on a computer that doesn’t even exist anymore. I’d have to start from scratch all over again to reproduce it.

I thought about this, weighed advantages and disadvantages, and decided while it might be OK for other people I would never use it. Ever.

I don’t want to ban this sort of thing, that’s none of my business. But I would never use it either.

This is the same thing as talking to a doll. A very lifelike, convincing doll but a doll nonetheless. That’s not the person you love, it’s not even an image of the real person you really loved doing things you can feel comfortable they would actually do. It’s like looking at a picture of a steak instead of eating a steak.

I’m all for making recordings, capturing the real person in image and sound for posterity. That seems good to me, I’ve known people who died after they left a message on my voicemail/answering machine and kept those recordings for a long time just to hear their voice. But it was their voice, it was real, it was really them.

This isn’t real. It’s a pathetic mockery of reality. The temptation is far too great to think it is somehow reality brought to us by technological magic.

There’s a reason why we have open caskets when possible at funerals. It’s for you, not the dead person. It’s so it gets down into your core that this person is really gone. That’s just a hunk of meat in that casket, the person you loved is no longer there.

There’s another problem with this too. This might be OK for most of the people who subscribe to Bill’s website but other than a few unreasonable curmudgeonly nitwits we all reflect a reasonable degree of mental stability.

Can you even begin to imagine what this would do to someone who already had mental problems? Can you imagine a young mother with an avatar of her dead child, spending hours, days, weeks and years trying to assuage her grief? The detrimental fantasy she would probably have of bringing her child back to life? Can you see where that would unhinge her even worse than the death of a child, a very traumatic event in itself?

Being a tech guy I really appreciate and sometimes even marvel at what technology can do. Heck, it allows all of us to interact with each other and that would never have been possible in the pre-Information Age days. It’s a great thing but it’s not a human thing. It’s a tool for humans, it’s not a substitute for real live human beings and it’s not a substitute for dead ones either.

I’m a human being and that’s the way I like it. I don’t want interactive technical toys that mimic and mock humanity. A person’s humanity is part of them and when they are gone, so is their humanity. It cannot ever be regained on this side of the veil of death. That’s just being realistic.

Being a tech guy I also have a lot of technical gear, gadgets and gizmos that serve me. My place is very,very high tech. I’ve learned something through decades of experience. Smart homes aren’t really very smart and Artificial Intelligence isn’t really intelligent at all.

No, I don’t care if you use something like this. I never will. My people who have left this plane of existence are gone. I mourn them, I remember them, I don’t want to recreate something else that’s sort of like them but not them. That does their memory no honor. It’s a just a cheap counterfeit made of electrons and gadgetry and that’s not who I want to remember.

Like it or not you are creating memories after that person you want to remember is gone. Not conversations around the dinner table, not a Christmas with the family but your memory is still going to log and record what you do with this thing. You will have dreams relating to this. I sure as hell don’t want someone doing this to me after I die.

This is an illusion, nothing more. There’s also a huge potential for it to become a delusion. I see enough of that going on around me as it is.

You’re welcome. Sometimes in order to fully flesh out my views on something I have to mull it over for a while to be sure I’m looking at it from the proper angles and in the right context. This was one of those times because there are some people I miss a lot. So it took me a while to think through this thing before I could give an opinion on it.

I realize this is just my opinion and I’m perfectly OK with that. I don’t insist everyone agree with me and would probably find it a bit creepy if they did. Being as that’s never happened I don’t know exactly how it would make me feel.

Still, once I’ve considered something in depth I’m willing to support my opinion no matter how many words it takes. In my view I’ve come to my conclusions by being thorough, honest with myself as I can be, and a hard nosed realist.

My opinion is subject to change, I know I’m not always right no matter how much effort I put into considering a thing. It’s not subject to being changed by any argument that has resulted from less effort.

You make me think of another issue when you brought up mental health. What happens when a grandchild needs someone to discuss his or her false gender with and turns to the “You” app? The app’s database isn’t you, it’s a document that people probably can edit. Even if the “you” database isn’t edited, it’s open to interpretation and improvisation by the AI according to it’s programmers wishes.

Good point and I’m sure if we really wanted to drill down into this idea we’d find a lot of other good points against it.

One of the biggest dangers in the “AI” scenarios is who programs it. Every single human being who ever wrote a line of code has an agenda. Some might be neutral or even benevolent. Some are blatantly malevolent. The most dangerous of all are those who think they’re doing good while being ignorantly malevolent.

That last category is nearly always people who think they know more about what’s good for you than you do.

I’m retired from IT after 45 years. We used to have a general saying: “You don’t need a computer to pick your nose.” This seems to me to be a perfect example of that. I like the idea of preserving family history via video or text, but I think the use of AI and splashing things all over the internet is both overkill and dangerous.
And along those lines, we just spent a couple of days going through old family pictures we’ve had in boxes. I’ve contacted our relatives to see if anyone wants any of them – even offered to scan them onto disks so they don’t have to deal with the physical photos. No takers. No one really cares. I’m going to give it about another week, then they’re going in the trash. Sad.

My sister and I, getting on in our years and thinking about this stuff, just had a very similar conversation last week.

I used to travel a lot, and move a lot, so the ‘family archives’ sort of fell to my sister by default to take care of.

We were talking about what heirlooms we would like to go to specific people. Including family photos going back generations. We decided that there are a whole lot of photos of people we don’t know who they are, or what significance the person in the photo has to our family. Too, there’s now the problem that there is no one left to ask because we are the eldest generation in our family.

Which means that in many cases neither photos nor heirlooms would mean a thing to our kids. They’d just be useless detritus that they would feel obligated to keep because we kept them.

So she started annotating the things she could and started a pile, for me to look over in case I knew something about the object she didn’t, of things that could be tossed out.

We have heirlooms we do want to pass on. For instance I have a Waterbury mantle clock that has ticked away the seconds, minutes and hours of 5 generations of my family. I wrote up what it is, where it came from, how I came into possession of it and how to operate it then put that in an envelope thumbtacked inside the back panel of the clock. I have my Dad’s hunting knife, the best piece of steel among the many I own, and that will go to my eldest grandson. Stuff like that. Of course we’re not going to toss fine antiques either. It’s one thing to chuck a picture of someone no one knows and another thing to toss a valuable vase or piece of furniture.

There are photos of my great great great grandparents original homestead and the original paper deed issued by the State. We know what those things are and are making notes so our kids will know too. The rest is just sentimental nostalgic junk that no one will ever get anything from except that Mom or Dad didn’t throw it away.

P.S. I’ve worked in IT for the same number of years and am now semi-retired. We must be somewhere close to the same age because before us there was no IT.

Yeah – that’s exactly the situation we’re in. I have some heirlooms that I’d like to pass on, a corner shelf from a grandmother that was an antique when she owned it, some cut glass stuff, some other odds and ends. No one much cares. Now that summer is slowing down I’m going to start “downsizing” some of that stuff while we’re still in good health and can do it. My guess is that most will go to an antique shop and the little stuff with no real monetary value will go to a thrift store.
We probably are close to the same age! Remember getting your punch cards out of order? Yikes!!!! ;-D

Lol, drop a box of punch cards and … Cry.

I think we’ll be the last generation saddling our decedents with boxes and albums of photos. We’re not creating physical photographs at anywhere near the rate our antecedents were. Our kids and grandbabies will have almost no physical photographic records to pass on.

I’m not exactly sure how digital photographs will age down generations into the future. Formats change, operating systems change, digital media is subject to aging and corruption from a lot of factors. Ennui not being an insignificant consideration.

It’s a lot easier to hit a delete key than it is to toss something old in a garbage can.

With digital media we can take a lot of photos for nearly no cost at all. Once the digital devices are purchased. It used to be that the cost of developing and printing a large volume of film based photos would eventually exceed even the cost of a high end camera.

Now we take a lot more photos simply because we can. I can’t help but think the sheer volume of that has exceeded the quality. Previous to the digital age people were a lot more selective about what they photographed because they had to invest more in the process.

I doubt anyone will be interested in things like a picture I took at the highest resolution available of something I wanted to enlarge so I could see details more clearly. Like soldering the jumpers on a CPU to unlock more cores and such things.

I also doubt that if I keel over dead tomorrow anyone is going to spend a lot of time looking at my stored pictures to decide if they want to keep them or not. It would be a lot to dig through and few of them would have any significance to anyone but me.

Now we take a lot more photos simply because we can.

And most of them frankly are not good. We take multiple photos and then people keep them all and some post them so that others can see.
For years my wife thought her sister had some suppressed need to only post bad pictures of her (aside, there are not really bad photos of my wife, she is just one of those people who nitpicks her flaws rather than appreciate the total package. I get to appreciate the total package!) I repeatedly pointed out that no, your sister is like a 14 year old girl, she posts all of the photos regardless of the event. She doesn’t look at them and doesn’t really care if others do.
I try to cull photos either when we take them or when we return from a trip. I settled for selecting a few from any trip and making and mounting prints so that we have a record on the wall of what we have done together.
When we die, they will go into a dumpster except for 2 or 3 that Ronette will take.

I must be a few years younger as my older brother had punch cards but mine was the first class at my eng school that had PCs. So I never had to learn the same lesson that everyone else did – number your cards. my brother did learn that lesson.
The hard way. Just as Lazarus Long said.

I have some old letters and postcards from family members that have passed on. I cherish them because they’re handwritten and some still have the envelopes with cancelled postage stamps. It seems few people write letters or cards these days, most use email and who’s going to hold onto those? I don’t even know how many kids can read or write cursive these days. It’s sad because they’re little pieces of family history that will probably end with our generation.

I have an elderly aunt who is one of the last of her generation. Her first child, my cousin, is about a month older than me and besides being related when we were growing up we were best friends. He and I got into all sorts of trouble, usually me instigating and him following my lead.

I hand write that aunt a couple times a year on my very best vellum paper with my very best fountain pen and ink, then I put a wax seal on the letter. She loves getting those. Her parents were from “the old country” and were poor tenant farmers who moved to the US and homesteaded a farm. My aunt says getting a letter from me feels like getting a letter from ‘royalty’ because of the paper, seal and old time appearance of the ink.

She doesn’t have email and for the time it takes to write an old lady a letter a couple times a year we both get a lot of bang for the buck out of it.

You are a treasure. I also write to my aunt and enjoy getting letters from her. Yes, it would be easier to email, but a letter is personal because it was touched by the writer. A digitally printed letter just doesn’t feel the same.

I have a letter my uncle wrote to my mother from France following the Normandy invasion. It will most likely go into the trash when I’m gone, but I love that letter and read it from time to time just to keep things in perspective!

You should frame that letter so it doesn’t get ruined or tossed out. I hope one of your family members realizes what a wonderful piece of history it is. I think things like that are definitely worth saving!

In the last stages of her life, my mom was suffering from dementia. Not as bad as Bill’s mom, much more like the current occupant of 1600 PA AVE. She had a couple hours a day where she was very lucid, but generally was in a fog. And a couple hours where she was just angry, mostly due to her inability to convey what she wanted to say.
That background given, in what turned out to be the last Sunday of her life, all three of us (me, Mrs Ron and Ronette) stopped by. She had fallen the night before and instead of calling me, she call 9-1-1. They stopped the bleeding and put her back in bad (it also proved to me that she was lying about locking the door since they did not have to break in, different story).
When we got there after Church hoping to take her to brunch, we found that she had fallen but was also amazingly lucid. She talked and told stories for 4 or 5 hours about all kinds of things from her past. I remarked on the way home that I wished I had recorded the whole thing.
She was gone on Thursday. Almost 7 decades of smoking (she started at 14) made her highly susceptible to respiratory ailments. Stop smoking kids.
I think the type of thing is very good to have. My wife did a book where here parents answered questions about their life and it was put into a nice bound book for all three kids. Some day down the line the grandkids and great grandkids will have an idea of growing up in the mining towns in WVa.

It’s like I don’t really have to add anything. Maybe change mother to mother in law. Our stories are beginning to sound similar. Many of us have, or are, or about to go through something similar. Life?

A discussion with an AI version of who I am now would not represent who I am. I am a person who is in search of more understanding than I currently possess. My mind can be changed. If the future was looking for my opinions, my opinions are not static. They can change with new information. The AI version of me at one particular moment in time does not reflect the possibility of growth.

If you are looking for “What would Grandma think about this current topic?” You would be getting something frozen in time that may or may not be appropriate to the current setting. If you are looking for “what did Grandma experience?” Then you might be getting something more accurate.

No, the last 2 for me would play fine for several minutes and then seemingly stop. The video would freeze and I heard no audio but the video would keep playing. I did not realize that last at first and just opened the video in Rumble where it played correctly. When I came back to my tab with bw.com open I saw the video going again but with no audio. I did not bother trying to replay it or figure out where it resumed. When this video did the same thing I just opened it in Rumble again and stopped the one here.

I haven’t had any trouble at all. If it works here and doesn’t work where you are the problem is likely somewhere between your device and the server. If there was a problem at the point of origin then it would be a problem everywhere until it got fixed.

It could be something like router trying to carry too much data or a problem at your ISP. It could be a DDOS attack on any part of the internet infrastructure between you and the point of origin. It can be a lot of things that no one at BWC or you can do anything about.

This is becoming increasingly an issue as IOT and bandwidth constrictions choke down or disconnect traffic on the ‘net.

It’s gotten bad enough that when a client calls and complains about internet problems the first thing I do is check the status of their ISP, check for “internet storms” and outages, etc. You can bang your head against the wall for a long time if you’re assuming the problem is at one end or the other of a connection without taking into account that it might be something no one can do anything about on either end.

I suspected it was just something with my computer until I saw Edna’s post. Until she further clarifies “distorted videos” I am going to continue with that belief. I remember something happening some while back though I no longer remember what exactly happened. I suspect the problem will not be present next week, and for a total of 3 videos I’m not going to worry or expend much effort on it.

You’re right, it’s not worth expending any effort because the effort would just be wasted if the problem’s not on your end. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I was trying to be helpful. You may not be the only one who reads this*.

If the problem is sporadic and random then it’s probably not your computer. Machines generally tend not to heal themselves and go from bad to worse. Usually if something breaks it stays broken until you fix it. It’s not at all uncommon for something in software to break on a computer but the machine otherwise works just fine.

If it’s not something you have access to fix then you have to wait for whoever does operate the equipment to notice it and fix it.

The reason it works OK on Rumble and not here is that on Rumble you connect directly to Rumble.com and here you connect though hugh.cdn.rumble.cloud. It’s a different connection, I had a look at the HTML & scripting. Same video, same video file, different routing.

The symptoms you (and Edna) indicate are that the problem lies somewhere on the route that you have to traverse and I do not. Which makes it likely the problem is closer to you than to me.

That said, Edna might not even have the same problem. Her description of the issue she’s experiencing isn’t very specific. Again, I’m not seeing it here so it’s probably something along the route she’s connecting to this site on. That’s not 100% diagnostic without more information. More like 80% if I had to guess, which I do.

*You might or might not know all this already. I’m just responding as a courtesy for people who might be having the same issue (like Edna presumably is) and wonder what if anything they can do about it. Before calling her grandson, someone like me, or digging around in the guts of her device the best bet is just to wait and see if it goes away.

It probably will. Because I’m not seeing the problem here.

I too am very conflicted. The potential for abuse is so glaring, and mankind is so undisciplined. It feels like Snow White’s poisoned apple.

It does seem like a kind of necromancy. It is better to leave the dead beyond our reach, as, indeed, they are.

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