Notes from #Web Summit: Artificial immortality: Letting my Dad live forever

James Vlahos takes us on a journey through his late father’s life and describes the lengths he took to preserve his father’s memory.

Details
Date: November 8, 2017
Time: 13:15
Conference stream: TalkRobot

Speakers
James Vlahos, Writer, Wired

Web Summit Summary
During the final period of his father’s life, this journalist and author made an unexpected and controversial call: to turn his dad’s voice, memories and essence into a chatbot. With ever-improving AI capabilities, are we moving towards a world in which tech will keep our loved ones from ever really dying? James Vlahos walks through the creation of his dadbot and shows how it works live.

Talk Summary

Old family photos depict the life of a man falling in love, starting a family and growing old. This man was James Vlahos’ father. James describes his father as a warm, loving human who was a little bit crazy — but in a good way. He was a typical father; he taught him how to play baseball as a child and was patient during his teenage years. He had a deep love of sports and the theatre. He also beamed as he explained his father’s unique qualities like his quirky sense of humour.

On April 23, 2016 James got a life changing call from his mother. What was first a suspected heart attack immediately turned into Stage 4 lung cancer. With the terminal diagnosis looming over them, James’ family wanted a way to hang onto their father. They decided to do an oral history project on his father’s entire life as a way to preserve his memories. Once completed and transcribed they felt it was great, but in a format that didn’t represent the dynamic person he was. Then an idea struck James in the form of a talking Barbie: he could preserve his father’s personality by chopping up the oral history and creating text bot.

James took this on as a personal project and used Pull String to create a bot that he could communicate with over Facebook Messenger. But James didn’t want the bot to only give monologues from the oral history; he had to be able to have conversations. As he worked on the bot, James admits the hardest parts were having it listen to what people had to say with intent. His real goal was to find a way for it to express itself as vividly as only his father could. He did this by injected several aspects of his father’s personality into the bot. His dad talked a lot about his Greek history so he had the bot do the same. He included jokes from his great sense of humour and odd catch phrases. He even included images of some of the strange lists (such as his top types of melons) he would keep around the house. To make the bot more than just a script he gave him some awareness of the time of day, and added voice snippets from the original oral recordings.

“People shouldn’t live forever but memories of the people we love should be immortal.”
- James Vlahos

Unfortunately, as James was working on the bot his father passed away. He continues to work on it and enjoys the interactions but adds that he doesn’t know whether his next one with the bot will make him laugh or cry. Although James worked hard to create this representation of his father, he understands the huge limits that separate the bot from the actual man. James works to continuously improve the bot but is aware of the line he doesn’t want to cross to make the bot too real and creepy. Humans have always been on a quest for immortality. Although he can’t bring his father back, technology can help him remember him.

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