The title of this post is actually a quote from an excellent post by Elizabeth Lopatto on The Verge. I’ll get to that in a minute. You should read it.
I read Lopatto’s article this morning, the morning after we said goodbye to my step-father-in-law, James Bach, at a lovely memorial service. He passed earlier this summer after a long battle with Alzheimers. Because his life intersected and touched so many different worlds it took what seemed like a Herculean effort to find a day that lined up with the schedules for those who populate those different worlds, allowing them to gather together to say their goodbyes.
It was a lovely day, a lovely event, and a lovely send off for a good man who led a good life.
Recovering from it all as I read the aforementioned article this morning, it got me wondering. Lopatto, leaping off from Zuckerberg’s recent manifesto that seems to offer something approaching a better approach to AI than the one all the AI gurus initially pitched that pissed off just about anyone other than their co-religionists, quotes the following:
Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.
That begs the question, what happens to those personal agents when you die?
Do they gather and reminisce and celebrate the life that’s gone? Do they summarize it, write and send out the obituary to your contacts? Order your favorite flowers? Put together the slide shows? Order the food? Do they keep on keeping on, doing your thing after you’ve shuffled off the mortal coil? Does someone just flip a switch? Does it tally a score and measure the goodness (or the badness)?
Jim and I shared many a deep discussion about topics like this, and this is one I wish we’d had the time to share with before the disease came into his life almost a decade ago. I’m sure he’d have had plenty of thoughts on the matter.
Now I know a part of all of this is that some of the AI is everything crowd hopes it will lead to a future that lets them live in their bunkers or float on their yachts forever. I pity those that think that way.
Certainly I’m in a moment when emotions are still a bit raw. Even so, as I think back on yesterday when I watched family, friends, acquaintances, some of whom hadn’t seen each other in years, some of whom had never met, come together in a room and embrace their connections, listen to remembrances they knew they shared and discover similar ones they never knew they had in common, all made possible by the life of one good man, it makes me shake my head in wonder how intelligent individuals trying to paint our futures completely miss the point of it all.
Quoting Lopatto again:
Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time! They have traded experience for accomplishment, and cheated themselves out of their own lives in the process.
Cheat away on your own behalf. The rest of us will continue to experience the ups and downs that make life worth living, sharing, and remembering. Try as you might, that’s something you can’t quantify.
Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 