The People We Remember

Part 3

Steven, Chamala and I all met in graduate school. We were focused on computers and the brain. The race was on to create Artificial Intelligence that replicated human intelligence. The problem was we didn't understand the brain. You can build algorithms that drive a car, fly a drone or read an MRI scan. But the brain was different. The brain was infinitely more complex than anything else in the universe.

Deep learning starts with training the data. If you are building a car you train the software to look at thousands of images of streets and traffic lights and signs. Once the system can finally recognize the difference between a red light and a green light, the difference between a stop sign and a yield sign, not with human accuracy but with accuracy a million times better than human judgement, then you program the system to act accordingly. The car stops at the stop sign, yields at the yield et cetera.

During my time in isolation, I was training the system to ingest the fabric of interpersonal interaction. Even before the lockdown, we were communicating remotely with my parents constantly since Andrew was born. The happy times were there. Sharing Andrew's early milestones and birthdays onscreen. The difficult times were also there, arguing with my parents about the direction my marriage was going. My denial when they raised concerns over Steven's deceptions. My annoyance when they would bring up some painful memory from childhood that I preferred to leave buried. They were quick to analyze relationships and I was quick to avoid analyzing relationships. All the data was there, the fabric of our family dynamic. It was up to me to write the code to make sense of it all.

Project Itako emerged from an AI program I wrote in college with the rudimentary mechanics of a personality engine. It would apply common patterns. Ways that my parents started conversations. Topics of interest in our discussions. People of interest in our discussions. Typical responses when I tried to be polite and empathetic. Typical responses when I tried to be rude.

Once I had optimized the personality engine based on interactions between my parents and myself, I started training the data I had for interactions with my aunts and uncles. I knew my mother liked to talk about football with her brothers. I knew my dad liked to reminisce about his childhood with his siblings.

I knew they would talk about the health problems of people in their peer group, relatives and friends from high school back in Pittsburgh. Like many old people they would talk about who had cancer, who was having a hip replacement, who kept forgetting to watch their blood sugar.

Then of course there was all the data from their interactions with Andrew. The smiling, the cooing, the tears of joy from the earliest months. The divergence between stern scolding and loving accommodation when he reached the terrible twos. My father was the strict one. My mother became a servant to his whims when he had a tantrum.

I ran tens of thousands of simulations in the personality engine, optimizing their reactions in asynchronous message channels like text and email as well as real-time interactions. Using the facial recognition software, I applied the simulation to their non-verbals making sure the eyes, the lips, the body language all moved perfectly in accordance to the situation.

Finally, after many months, I was satisfied with the level of authenticity of the result. It was like a video chat with my real parents. If it could be done for them. It could be done for the millions of families who had lost loved ones during the pandemic. It was only then that I told Chamala about Itako. It was a tendency of mine, to create codenames that seemed random and cryptic until you heard the explanation behind them. And once you heard the background behind the name, the details of the project were embedded in your hippocampus for quick and specific recall that other people could not fathom. Like an inside joke.

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It's possible to love your parents very deeply and at the same time have very different goals and values. It's possible to be incredibly grateful for the life your parents gave you and at the same time want very desperately to transform that life beyond recognition. The problem is how you reconcile these competing impulses and conflicting feelings.

To what extent does independence from your family become a betrayal of them?

To what extent does accommodation of your family become a betrayal of yourself?

I struggled with these feelings from a young age. My parents lived their whole lives in the same house in my hometown, a few miles from where they met, a few miles from the homes where they were born. In a way my hometown was their entire world, though they watched the news and read books and were certainly aware of what was happening across the state line and overseas.

My father was a schoolteacher and my mother was a librarian. Their existence was grounded in the people they knew around the block, around the neighborhood. Each relationship meant something and might lead to a lengthy conversation. When my father's sister got divorced that led to relentlessly detailed and repetitive ruminations on my sister's feelings about the divorce. As an exhaustive inventory of her husband's feelings and their kids' feelings and my father's feelings and my mother's feelings. This in turn would inevitably climax in a melodramatic analysis of the underlying quality of relationships within our extended family. And who may or may not be to blame for their own unhappiness or the unhappiness of others.

And in my teenage brain these long, drawn-out, dinner-time conversations were exasperating. Because in my mind I was thinking about the great advancements in human civilization, such as the woman's suffrage movement or the germ theory of disease. Would any of these breakthroughs happened if people were consumed with small talk about their feelings? In fact, wasn't the whole point of being a person to transcend our feelings? Weren't they just a series of chemical reactions in the neural pathways? Wasn't the whole point to transcend them, to rise above the fray?

As teenager, I would read about the great people I admired. People like Ada Lovelace, who published the first machine algorithm and gave birth to the idea of computer programming in the 1800s. What if she had been consumed by the bitterness between her mother and father, Lord and Lady Byron? What if she had let herself become immersed in self-pity and introspection over her father's untimely death when she was still an infant? Where would the world be if she hadn't set her mind beyond her on this emotional turmoil to focus on the languages of mathematics and poetry. This was what enabled her to see the ability for computers to find applications beyond mere numbers-crunching and create the foundation for the modern world we live in.

I knew at a young age what is was like to be in a loving family in a welcome home and yet feel completely disconnected. I would be connected to people like me whom I had never met, like Ada Lovelace, people who wanted to create the wings that would allow us to fly like birds above the tedium of daily life, people who wanted to be close to the stars.

Now in my daily shelter-in-place routine, I was the one halfway to the clouds, creating the wings to soar even higher, while Andrew and my parents lingered on the surface far below. What they didn't know, what they couldn't possibly know, was that I was creating wings for all of us. We would fly where no one had ever flown before. I would make sure that our wings were full proof. We would not end up like Icarus.