Chapter 22: Ploy

THE DOWNSIDE of an overnight ‘thinking’ trip was that Henry was 400 miles from home in the morning and hadn’t slept. He sent text messages to his partners inviting them to make themselves at home in the apartment office. He found a motel he could day-sleep in and then headed back home that night.

“So, what took you out of town so suddenly?” Chastity asked when he arrived back. He found her sleeping on the sofa in the living room waiting for him. She went to his bedroom and slipped into bed with him. “Don’t get used to this. I’m just still too sleepy to go home. Tell me what’s up.”

“I figured out a general structure for preserving a person’s life record and then accessing it randomly. I have a whole lot of development to do and will try to pull together a prototype in the next few months, but it will really be cool. You see, I’ll start by asking my dad to record his stories and to file his papers and documents on a hard drive I’ll give him. I think he’ll cooperate. Then I’ll train the AI on his memories. It works on the same principle as the optimization AI, learning how important things are by how often they appear in his papers. Then, I can ask questions of the AI and it will be as if Dad was answering them.”

He looked over at Chastity and saw she was sound asleep. He rolled over and went to sleep as well. When he woke up in the morning, Chastity was gone.

“The general concept has been around for a while,” Henry explained to his father. “Kurzweil wanted to ask questions of his deceased father and started pulling together things from his past. But to use AI, he or people he worked with tried to train a general AI—or as near as we have to a general AI—to think like his father. These massive AIs, though, have too much crap in them. A person could never navigate that much material. But if you trained an AI only on that person’s information and thoughts, it would be much more faithful to the character of that person. You. Kurzweil called it The Singularity.”

“You’re preparing for me to die?” Ryan asked his son.

“Shit! No! That’s ... Yeah, maybe. I’m not looking forward to it any time soon, but I am thinking that someday in the distant future, maybe your grandchildren or great grandchildren might want to get to know you and who you really were,” Henry said.

“Ah. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now we’re talking. Any prospects?”

“That’s the problem, Dad. It could take me years to get around to procreating. Not against it, but just can’t handle it at the moment.”

“Okay. I’ll participate in your great experiment. What do I need to do?”

Henry paused. His notes were expansive and he wasn’t sure how much he needed yet.

“Let’s start with anything you already have and just copy it onto a hard drive. I don’t expect to be able to begin training the AI for at least a year or more. Then anything new you add would increase its knowledge of you. So, documents you have, including scans of photos, email, poetry you secretly wrote to Mom, and stories you think of from your life. The stories can either be written, or sit in front of a video recorder and just tell the stories. Might be difficult at first, but you’ll relax into it. You can even have Mom there to tell the stories to if you want. There are a dozen services that sprang up a few years ago to help people write their memoirs. We can subscribe to a couple of those and you’ll get a prompt each week for something to talk about,” Henry said.

“There’s nothing really here that we can sell, is there?” Luke asked when they all got together Tuesday afternoon.

“This definitely has a longer dev cycle than other things I’ve worked on, simply because the data needs to be gathered before the AI can be trained,” Henry said.

“How do we serve this to people? Wouldn’t you need a server farm if your AI was working on 500 or 5,000 people’s lives? How much data is in a person’s life?” Isobel asked.

“Yeah. It would be a problem. That’s why I’m basing it on what we do for AI driven optimization. In fact, I think it’s the only way we’d ever sell anything. It has to be local and not in the cloud. In other words, the AI resides on the customer’s computer with no interaction with the internet. All that person’s data is kept local. They can back it up to the cloud if they want to, but the operation is always local,” Henry explained, pointing out the pieces in his schematic drawing.

“Is there anything we could test it on that doesn’t require waiting for your father to record his entire life?” Chastity asked.

“I have a vague idea for a test,” Henry said. “It could use the same overall principle in which you ask a question and it gives an answer.”