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October 26, 2021

Death and Grief: Talking to Past Loved Ones Through Artificial Intelligence

Talking to Past Loved Ones Through Artificial Intelligence
BY: TARTLE

For years, “delebrities” — which refer to the continued licensing of the names and images of dead celebrities, helped rake in millions of dollars for advertising and marketing purposes. In showbiz, they’ve also been utilized from beyond the grave to maintain the integrity of a film in progress. 

Back when Furious 7 was still in the works, fans all over the world mourned the untimely passing of Paul Walker. In an effort to remain true to the spirit of the film. Director James Wan decided to hire a digital effects studio to insert Walker’s likeness into the last parts of the movie. 350 CGI shots of the late actor, with distant shots of his brother, helped bring his character’s arc as well as the movie into completion.

This trend isn’t limited to deceased celebrities. Recently, the DeepNostalgia app brought tons of netizens to tears as they watched old family photos of loved ones come alive in just a few clicks. It’s brought looking to pictures, text chats, and other content of our deceased loved ones for comfort to a different level.

If this is a glimpse into what life after death can promise for the ones who’ve been left behind, how will tech professionalists, programmers, and data scientists navigate the ethics of preserving the name, image, and likeness of the deceased? 

In Loving Memory...

In this podcast, we mention how important it is to collect information and knowledge gathered in the past, and forward it in the most efficient manner. Ultimately, the purpose of technology has always been to enhance our capabilities by opening doors to new and exciting possibilities. We’ve been capable of introducing a better quality of life through the introduction of blockchain technology in the global logistics industry, online banking and cryptocurrency for the unbanked in developing countries across the world, and cloud storage for businesses around the world.

What’s contentious about this is the intent behind our usage of such technologies. These machines have yet to find a way to operate autonomously and on their own goals; it’s always an extension of our desires and needs.

Grief and loss have always been difficult aspects of our existence. However, with the introduction of these technologies, the permanence of their death is brought into question. What if we could create new memories with the artificial likeness of our deceased loved ones? 

Meaningfully Processing Our Grief

The modern understanding of how we process grief, which can be attributed to Swiss-American scientist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, laid out the general roadmap: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.

There is no question about whether we can develop technologies powerful enough to emulate our deceased loved ones. However, there certainly is contention about whether it would help us come to terms with their passing. A common concern, should these technologies proliferate, is whether it would hinder the grieving from making it past the first stage of denial — where they choose instead to cling to a beautiful, yet false reality. 

To add to the confusion, progress does not always take a linear path. It is possible for some people to cope well with the loss of a loved one for extended periods of time, only to relapse aggressively into nostalgic and even self-destructive behaviors when they are exposed to a trigger that brings them back to such a painful point in their life. 

Closing Thoughts: Human Psychology and Experience

When such a visceral reminder of people who have had a strong impact on our lives can become a lingering possibility, the temptation to relapse becomes more tangible. How can these technologies be used to improve the way we process our grief? As is with any other man made creation, understanding and regulating the impact of our work is just as important as turning the potential of what we make into reality.

We live in exciting times and we are, doubtlessly, privileged to have our lives improved by the presence of the latest scientific innovations. Whether we can continue to remain at the helm of our own progress remains to be seen.

Our response to these possibilities may define what it means to live out one of the most pivotal parts of the authentic human experience: the aspect of our lives that is associated with human psychology and moving on, and the painful learning process that everybody inevitably has to deal with.

How far would you go to bring back someone you love?

What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.

Summary
Death and Grief: Talking to Past Loved Ones Through Artificial Intelligence
Title
Death and Grief: Talking to Past Loved Ones Through Artificial Intelligence
Description

For years, “delebrities” — which refer to the continued licensing of the names and images of dead celebrities, helped rake in millions of dollars for advertising and marketing purposes. In showbiz, they’ve also been utilized from beyond the grave to maintain the integrity of a film in progress. 

Feature Image Credit: Envato Elements
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For those who are hard of hearing – the episode transcript can be read below:

TRANSCRIPT

Alexander McCaig (00:08):

Guten Morgen everyone, and welcome back to Turtle cast. Again, beautiful morning over here in New Mexico.

Jason Rigby (00:16):

Yeah. It's supposed to be perfect today, 90 or something.

Alexander McCaig (00:19):

Delicious dry heat.

Jason Rigby (00:19):

Oh, yeah.

Alexander McCaig (00:20):

I love it when people are like, "Oh, dry heat." I said "It's 108 the other day." And they're like, "Yeah, but it's dry heat." I'm like, "It's still 108 degrees."

Jason Rigby (00:28):

Yeah. We were just in Vegas. It was hot, hot.

Alexander McCaig (00:30):

It was really humid there, so.

Jason Rigby (00:32):

Oh really?

Alexander McCaig (00:33):

Yeah. There's talk about climate data. So they started this initiative in the sixties, Las Vegas did, to plant as many trees and green space as possible. It's actually altered the climate there over 60 years. It's made it far more humid and actually changed a lot of the weather patterns in that area.

Jason Rigby (00:49):

Oh, that's cool.

Alexander McCaig (00:51):

When I came over in the mountain range into Vegas for the first time, I was like, "Why is there so many trees out here?" I would assume that Lake Mead is probably the agricultural feeder for that one water.

Jason Rigby (01:02):

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Well, I know there's a lot of manmade lakes, and rivers.

Alexander McCaig (01:08):

Lake Mead is huge.

Jason Rigby (01:08):

Arizona has a lot of that, where they have the man-made ones and then they put houses on them.

Alexander McCaig (01:12):

If you look at the data, Arizona shouldn't exist. The cities.

Jason Rigby (01:15):

Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (01:15):

Those cities in Arizona should not exist at all. They could not exist if they didn't artificially pipe water in to them.

Jason Rigby (01:20):

Yeah. Oh yeah. You can't live-

Alexander McCaig (01:22):

So think about the amount of waste.

Jason Rigby (01:24):

I bet Phoenix right now is a hundred.

Alexander McCaig (01:26):

It's, I think it's 104 this week. All week.

Jason Rigby (01:28):

Yeah. It's crazy. Speaking of data, and of course we're on T cast, but I thought this was interesting. I was reading an article about a lady, an AI scientist, and her good friend died suddenly. And so she took, she had all the text messages that they had ever, she just never deleted it. So she had it all on her phone. So she put it in an AI, and then the AI was able to, machine learning, was able to read how this person interacts, and how they interact, and then she built this program that was basically kind of like her friend, that she could text back to, even though the friend was dead.

Jason Rigby (02:07):

And I've heard of people doing this, with Einstein and stuff like that, there's a couple AI scientists that are taking all the lectures, all the audio, any video that's out there, just all this huge amounts of data, and then putting it into the cloud, and then having it learn itself, and then wanting us to be able to ask it questions or communicate, and then we could actually resurrect, kind of, resurrect someone.

Jason Rigby (02:35):

And I thought, what if we, because it's all in the point of data, you couldn't do this with Play-Doh, but you could do it with Enstein, or what's the famous physicist, Feynman?

Alexander McCaig (02:47):

Feynman.

Jason Rigby (02:49):

Yeah. I mean all his lectures, I sent him to you the other day.

Alexander McCaig (02:52):

Yeah, the Feynman series.

Jason Rigby (02:53):

Yeah, I mean, he has hundreds of hours of lectures, all recorded. You could get, the AI could get, as it becomes learning more and more, and you give it more data, it could get to the point to where you could actually, for the most part, maybe you wouldn't understand if he's funny, or angry, or whatever, but on a logical basis, you could actually speak to him.

Alexander McCaig (03:17):

What you're talking about is very important point, and this is going to be a big deal for us in the future, is the ability to collect information of knowledge that has grown in the past, and then be able to carry it forward efficiently. So I saw this problem a lot in my consulting career, with dealing with regime changes in certain businesses. If you haven't recorded things properly, or put it into systems that can be repurposed, what happens is when those people leave, they take the wisdom with them, and then people are left from square one again. So the businesses are always restarting.

Jason Rigby (03:52):

That makes sense.

Alexander McCaig (03:53):

So if you can actually capture these things, upload them into the cloud, and create a repository, or a store of knowledge that can be accessed, and have a conversation with, so that we can learn from it, an actual very active dialogue so people can learn at their own speeds and paces, this is very beneficial for us to bring our learning catalysts forward, and not lose what has been gained in always starting from square one. You see what I'm saying?

Jason Rigby (04:19):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (04:19):

That's what that is. It's really understanding the knowledge transfer from one legacy of individuals to the next, and not losing that wisdom from those generations, because you have generations of workers. And that's the thing that can't be lost. So whether it be the text messages we find here, the benefit of machine learning in this instance, is the fact that we can converse now with knowledge. Rather than just record it and stick it into a system like some database and just have it sitting there, we actually make it active. When you increase the motion and the transfer of that information, now it's more flexible to adapt to whatever that person coming in to meet that data. And that's what machine learning is affording us, is flexibility of the information, rather than having it very stale and inflexible.

Jason Rigby (05:08):

But I mean, what if you had somebody that was married for 50 years, and then they're able to upload all this information because they have tons of data, video, audio, all this stuff. They're able to upload it to this program, and then they could turn around... On a philosophical, let's get a little philosophical, this will be fun. On a philosophical format, could you get over a person better if you could communicate with them, in this format? Or would it hinder you moving on? You see what I'm saying?

Alexander McCaig (05:39):

I don't think that's... It has nothing to do with the AI. I think that's a learning function for you to deal with. Remember the AI is just a tool, nothing else. And we can use tools for good or bad. So if you want it to exacerbate an issue that you may have, exacerbate your mourning, whatever that might be for an even prolonged period of time, increase attachment to something, or you want to use it to actually learn, thank it for that experience and then move on with your life-

Jason Rigby (06:07):

Because I can just imagine Bill and Mary being married for 50 years. Bill is in his seventies, he's at home alone now, he lost the love of his life. He goes and texts this AI, and then it sounds just like her. There's going to be an attachment there.

Alexander McCaig (06:22):

Oh most definitely.

Jason Rigby (06:23):

But would it help with the healing?

Alexander McCaig (06:25):

Well, I guess that depends on Bill.

Jason Rigby (06:28):

See, this is where I'm getting at. Because all these systems are going to... This, what we're talking about right now, is going to happen.

Alexander McCaig (06:35):

Yeah, no, it's happening.

Jason Rigby (06:36):

Yeah. It's happening.

Alexander McCaig (06:37):

It's already happening. I forget what that movie was, where the guy has got a camera and he starts to have a relationship with the AI?

Jason Rigby (06:44):

Oh Her.

Alexander McCaig (06:45):

Her.

Jason Rigby (06:45):

Yeah. That's with the famous-

Alexander McCaig (06:47):

That's what this is, right-

Jason Rigby (06:47):

Great actor.

Alexander McCaig (06:48):

Right? The thing is it's-

Jason Rigby (06:49):

Joker dude.

Alexander McCaig (06:50):

Yeah. What do you want to do? Do you want to have that relationship? Do you choose to fully live in that artificial world?

Jason Rigby (06:58):

Scarlet Johannson?

Alexander McCaig (06:59):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (07:00):

Have a relationship with her?

Alexander McCaig (07:02):

Sure. Sure.

Jason Rigby (07:05):

How much?

Alexander McCaig (07:05):

Yeah, exactly. I'll take 10 AI. But that's the point it's-

Jason Rigby (07:10):

I think it was in, wasn't it in Blade Runner? Remember he had the girl that was kind of a hologram or whatever?

Alexander McCaig (07:17):

No, she wasn't a hologram. She was a cyborg.

Jason Rigby (07:19):

Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (07:19):

Full blown.

Jason Rigby (07:20):

Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (07:20):

But, that's the interesting part. Yeah. She was, oh god, what are they called?

Jason Rigby (07:25):

But he had to have a projector or something, and then he had the little piece or whatever? On the newest Blade Runner. The 2049.

Alexander McCaig (07:31):

Oh the new boy. Oh yeah.

Jason Rigby (07:31):

Yeah. Remember that?

Alexander McCaig (07:31):

And it's got the thing in the room?

Jason Rigby (07:31):

Yeah, she glitched, or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alexander McCaig (07:35):

Yeah. He was all bummed out about that. But he was the cyborg that could reproduce, it was a part of that series.

Jason Rigby (07:45):

But these things are going to happen. We're going to have this.

Alexander McCaig (07:48):

Yeah. There's been so many times that science fiction becomes science fact. We just need to recognize that the artificial aspects of these things, computers, will always be computers,

Jason Rigby (07:59):

But does it become reality then?

Alexander McCaig (08:02):

It's reality in the fact that we're using the tool, that is a very real thing. But it, in and of itself, as its own entity, is not a real thing. It's a computer. It will always be a computer, no matter how advanced, and how seamless it looks to be like a human being, a very organic thing-

Jason Rigby (08:18):

Or how it gives a certain emotion.

Alexander McCaig (08:20):

Yes.

Jason Rigby (08:20):

Because social media does that now.

Alexander McCaig (08:22):

Yeah, and it will know how to trigger certain emotions within you.

Jason Rigby (08:26):

Oh, of course. It's the manipulating the emotions. It's the perfect, it's the Ex Machina machine.

Alexander McCaig (08:33):

Ex Machina, yeah that's exactly right.

Jason Rigby (08:34):

It's like, "Oh, let me play like I'm vulnerable." And-

Alexander McCaig (08:37):

Yeah, and that's what I mean, they're all the [inaudible 00:08:39] intelligent, but remember, we will come to this path. It will converge. Do we want to use it to help us evolve, and recognize that it's a computer as a tool helping us do that? Or do we want to fully integrate this into our society and say, "This is real for us. These are entities." We've done it with corporations. It is more than likely going to happen, that we will say that some forms of artificial intelligence, artificial computing, synthetic people, will be their own entities. I think for whatever reason, we will form some sort of emotional attachment. We do with dogs. We do it with cars.

Jason Rigby (09:16):

Why wouldn't we do it with robots?

Alexander McCaig (09:18):

Why wouldn't we do it with robots? Because it's even that much closer. You know what I mean?

Jason Rigby (09:21):

Yeah. Robots are physical.

Alexander McCaig (09:22):

Yeah. So it's bound to happen. It'll get there, and it's just a matter of time.

Speaker 4 (09:35):

Thank you for listening to Turtle cast with your host Alexander McCegg and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future, and source data defines the past. What's your data worth?