Can AI help to preserve a legacy after death?

Could AI simulations of the dead let us “chat” with Maimonides or Rashi? If the sages had access to the modern Internet, could they rule on contemporary issues?

By BRIAN BLUM NOVEMBER 30, 2024 02:59

‘MY NEXT cancer treatment could cure me. I could live until my 90s, healthy and hale, climbing up mountains,’ the writer says. (photo credit: Colton Miller/Unsplash)

Everything came crashing down at once.

A trifecta of physical and emotional stress washed over me, leaving me despondent over politics, war, and a sudden change in my health.

The combination left me so deeply depressed that I couldn’t stop crying for several days, until I realized that my foul mood was being fueled by inadvertently going cold turkey off a high dose of steroids. 

Frankly, I’m lucky I made it through those three days of withdrawal alive.

Israel’s multi-front war, coupled with the implications of the US elections and Israeli coalition machinations, would have been enough to sour just about anyone’s outlook on life. But I had a physical reason to be discouraged.

An empty hospital bed at Hasharon Hospital (credit: Courtesy)

My cancer had come back.

Its sudden advance came shockingly fast. In September my wife, Jody, and I spent 10 days on vacation in Portugal. 

Just a few weeks later, I was writhing in pain, trying to find a comfortable position on the hard plastic waiting room chairs in the emergency room at Hadassah University Medical Center, in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.

After my spending some nine hours there over a Friday night, the radiologist’s report revealed the culprit: A tumor was pressing on my ureter – that’s the tube that connects the kidneys to the bladder. 

I’ve never had kidney stones, but I’m told this is what it feels like.

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The supercool bispecific antibody I had been getting for most of 2024 knocked out 95% of my cancer, but one tumor proved refractory.

I was put on prednisone on the chance it would shrink the tumor somewhat, if only temporarily, before I’d need to start a much more aggressive protocol of chemo for my cancer.

Over the course of my depression, I began to grapple with my mortality, not for the first time but in a more open, serious way. 

I’m not in danger of dying anytime soon, but the failure of my previous treatments and the harshness of the next one (and the statistical probability that it, too, will fail) resulted in one of the worst things that can happen to a human being.

I lost hope.

Any expectations I may have harbored about how long I’ll live and what kind of quality of life I’ll have going forward were dashed by the pervasive doom and gloom.

When I started the bispecific antibody, I imagined being cancer-free for years. I would live at least as long as my father (he died at 81); Jody and I would celebrate 50 years of marriage; I would dance at our grandchildren’s bar mitzvahs – maybe even their weddings!

And now – I have no idea. I could be gone in a couple of years, or if I’m feeling optimistic, five or 10.

Will I have energy to kick a ball around with three-year-old Ilai? Push one-year-old Roni on the swings? Will we still be able to hike? Travel overseas?

Or will my new normal be one of limitation and discomfort?

When I’m feeling under the weather, I can spend hours doom-scrolling online.

Which led to another morbid thought: Is that what life is, really – a multi-decade-long distraction from death? Are all the things we do – from raising a family to work – essentially a way to keep from fixating on the inevitable? 

Is it at all possible to add anything lasting and meaningful to the world? Or will all that be forgotten in a generation... or less?

If I believed in an afterlife, I might be less bothered by my eventual demise. But for me, I’ve always viewed immortality as being all about legacy. William Shakespeare, David Ben-Gurion, Moses – all are unlikely to be forgotten.

For the rest of us, once we’re gone, our children will remember us for a while, but if we die too soon, for the grandkids we’ll just be that old geezer with the funny voice on the videotape.

Can technology help?

Thirty-one-year-old computer engineer Muhammed Aurangzeb Ahmad describes to writer David Zvi Kalman in an episode of his podcast Belief in the Future how sad he was that his father, who died young, would never have a relationship with Ahmad’s yet-to-be-born children.

Ahmad built an AI tool dubbed Grandpa Bot into which he uploaded his father’s text messages, recorded phone conversations, and home videos to create an interactive simulation.

Ahmad isn’t alone. In South Korea, a woman reunited with her dead daughter using virtual reality. A Chinese software developer has reportedly created AI simulations for 600 families.

Ahmad knows Grandpa Bot isn’t really his father. “It does not have a consciousness,” he tells Kalman. “It just mimics a few aspects of my father’s personality.”

Originally, Ahmad limited Grandpa Bot’s knowledge to just what Ahmad had uploaded. As a result, his father was not able to relate to current events. That confused his children. “So, reluctantly, I’ve added some bits of data here and there.”

Kalman sees the value in this kind of AI. But it’s important, he adds, to ask whether you are “simulating the dead because you want to stay in the past or because you want to move forward with your life.”

Could AI simulations of the dead let us “chat” with Maimonides or Rashi? If the sages had access to the modern Internet, could they rule on contemporary issues? Would a chatbot Talmud be more accessible to the masses than its current form? Could it “bring back” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Chabad, who died in 1994, turning him into a virtual messiah?

In my pursuit of legacy, I realize that I could be obsessing over an outcome that, for me, is far from ordained. 

My next cancer treatment could cure me. I could live until my 90s, healthy and hale, climbing up mountains (and climbing over grandchildren).

Or the world could end in nuclear annihilation, and then who cares about legacy, anyway?

Oops, that was the prednisone talking again.

The writer’s book Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World has been published as an audiobook. Available on Amazon and other online booksellers. brianblum.com