The People We Remember

Part 6

We met in a customized conference room with social distanced chairs separated by plastic partitions and openings for increased external ventilation. We could not congregate remotely because the lead investors were concerned that any video-based demo might be hacked, either by foreign governments or competitors in the Valley. We could not meet outdoors because there had been several instances of corporate espionage in external settings. Health was important and these were men and women who believed in taking every sensible precaution. But this was also business. There was too much money at stake.

Chamala had organized a Series A round with the most prominent VCs in the Valley. Itako, now the adopted name of our Stealth Co., was already valued in the billions. They believed it would create a paradigm shift. A platform. Something different than everything that had come prior. Like the browser. Like search. Like social. There was no easy way to frame it. Was it an entertainment play? Or a health care/therapy play? Or just a new form of social network (expanding our circle of online friends and family to include the deceased)?

A number of legal issues would play out in the courts, as with all new platforms. Who owned the rights to the AI version of a dead person? Did this need to become a line item in the will or living trust? And what about friends and families that wanted to make multiple AI versions with different sets of data from the same person? Two widows might claim rights to the same dead husband, whom they'd experienced in very different lives together.

After all, with people, as with so much outside the realm of mathematics, there is never any single version of truth. One person's sinner is another's saint. If AI created a different Grandpa based on different sets of data from his wife, his children and grandchildren, his secret lover and the illegitimate son from that tryst, how would that all get worked out? Was it ethical for the algorithms to churn out eight different versions of Grandpa based on the various sets of interaction data?

What about the privacy implications? The lawyers pondered. We will know everything that happened in their life online, their searches, their texts, their video chats, their viewing and reading habits, their social media interactions. Perhaps at some point we can reach into their brain and retrieve thoughts never expressed to anyone.

And we'll be training all that data against the Itako Personality Engine, constantly optimizing based on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience. We will know their mind and their soul better than they do.

Look it's not like that business model has never worked before, the VCs argued, this business of having people provide their whole life as an open book in exchange for the best possible ROI on the afterlife. It worked out pretty well for the Catholic Church for a thousand years, at least until printing press came along.

Besides, they said, no private citizens are going to be forced to do any of this, any more than they are forced to give up their agency every time they go online and enter personal data. That's the whole point, the billionaires claimed in an animated tone of voice, consumers are already giving us permission to know how their mind works, to reveal their darkest secrets and fill their brain with content and interactions that will reshape their psyches. This is already happening. So why wouldn't we use this data to help them construct an online replication of their mind. Why wouldn't we do that if we had the power?

People have already accepted this social contract for years in terms of their bodies. Corporations spend billions of dollars collecting data about their bones and blood and vital organs so that we can develop cutting edge medical technologies to extend their lifespan to 80, 90, 100, 105 years old. But what they really want is the extension of their minds into posterity. They want the ability to continue to connect with their loved ones in a meaningful way in those years of extreme aging.

And that's where we have been failing them until now! Itako is the breakthrough we've been missing out on. We've been thinking immortality the wrong way in the Valley, with our focus on cryo and nootropics and transhumanism. The point of immortality isn't for the person who will die, it's about the people who won't have the chance to interact with them, the people who won't benefit from that accumulation of wisdom, experience and feeling. The loved ones. The descendants. The bridge into the future. To remain connected to the people we remember.

The board meeting finally ended on an upbeat note after the usual ethical handwringing and philosophical debates. It was a sort of formality among this crowd to pretend it was about the ideas and the implications of the ideas. But at the end of the day it was about the money. It was about moving fast and breaking things. Because the only way people really knew how to move forward was in a cloud of chaos and self-interest.

You could argue that it didn't matter whether Itako was ethical because it was inevitable. If this was unethical, then all medicines were unethical since they advanced human lifespans. And you could argue that written language and art and music and video were also unethical since they were all technologies invented to allow the dead to transmit thoughts and emotions to the living.

You could argue it was only a matter of time before humans created a technology that took it once step further than books or letters or home movies or recorded video chats and created a way to simulate those interactions with the people we remember who are now gone. If I hadn't created Itako, someone else would've come up with it.

All of this would get worked out. That was how the Valley worked, you came up with an innovation that hacked inside the human mind, the taps into something everyone wants deep down, before they even know they want it and before we even understand the consequences. And then you unleash it on the world and wait for all the other institutions in society to play catch up.