A6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 , 2019
mobile devices or voice comput-
ing platforms such as Amazon’s
Alexa, asking him questions, elic-
iting stories and drawing upon a
lifetime’s worth of advice long
after his physical body is gone.
Someday, Kaplan — who play-
fully refers to himself as a “guin-
ea pig” — may be remembered as
one of the world’s first “digital
humans.”
“Being a pioneer at my age is
kind of unexpected,” he said,
“but I figured, why the hell not?”
For decades, Silicon Valley fu-
turists have sought to unchain
humanity from the corporeal life
cycle, viewing death as yet an-
other transformational problem
in need of a “life-altering” solu-
tion. What began with the cryon-
ics movement, in which bodies
are frozen for future resuscita-
tion, has intensified amid the
rise of digital culture. Today, a
new generation of companies are
hawking some approximation of
virtual immortality — the oppor-
tunity to preserve one’s legacy
online forever.
On its website, Eternime
claims that more than 4 4,
people have already signed up to
partake in its “big hairy auda-
cious goal”: turning the “memo-
ries, ideas, creations and stories
of billions of people” i nto intelli-
gent avatars that look like them
and liv e on indefinitely. Nec-
tome, a research company spe-
cializing in memory preserva-
tion, hopes its high-tech brain
embalming process will someday
allow our minds to be reanimat-
ed as a computerized simulation.
HereAfter, an allusion to the
future as well as the eternal, is
the start-up that Kaplan has
embraced, eager to become one
of the world’s first virtual resi-
dents, partly because he consid-
ers the effort a way to extend
intimate family bonds over mul-
tiple generations. The company’s
motto — “Never lose someone
you love” — reflects Kaplan’s
reasons for signing up.
“My parents have been gone
for decades, and I still catch
myself thinking, ‘Gee, I would
really like to ask my mom or dad
for some advice or just to get
some comfort,’ ” he said. “I don’t
think the urge ever goes away.
“I have a son in his 30s, and
I’m hoping this will be of some
value to him and his children
someday,” he added.
The rituals surrounding death
may be as diverse as the cultures
they spring from, but for decades
now, many of us have followed a
similar script after loved ones
depart: We pore over old family
photo albums, watch grainy
home movies, plaster their faces
on T-shirts — or even memorial-
ize their Facebook page, preserv-
ing their digital quintessence
online.
However, futurists say that
script may be on the verge of a
rewrite. If technology succeeds
in creating emotionally intelli-
gent digital humans, experts say,
it may forever change the way
living people cooperate with
co mputers and experience loss.
“A ndyBot” may become one of
the world’s first meaningful ex-
amples, raising complex philo-
sophical questions about the na-
ture of immortality and the pur-
pose of existence itself.
HereAfter was co-founded by
Sonia Talati, who calls herself a
personal legacy consultant, and
James Vlahos, a California jour-
nalist and conversational-AI de-
signer who is best known for
creating a software program
called the D adbot. Brought to l ife
after Vlahos learned that his
father was dying of cancer, the
Dadbot allows him to exchange
text and audio messages with a
computerized avatar of his late
father, conversing about his life
as well as hearing songs, small
talk and jokes.
Once the Dadbot became
widely known, Vlahos received
so many requests to create me-
morializing bots for other people
LEGACY FROM A
that he decided an untapped
market f or m aking virtual people
was primed for the mainstream.
“It took my mom two years to
remove the answering-machine
message with my dad’s voice
from their home phone,” Vlahos
said. “She didn’t want to extin-
guish his voice, and that’s some-
thing I’ve heard from other peo-
ple. But it’s almost comical that
we’re still relying on such a
primitive method to hear the
voices of our loved ones after
they’re gone.”
Instead of merely hearing arecording, Vlahos is building a
more sophisticated and user-
friendly virtual model that is
being designed to encourage in-
teraction. It will probably begin
with an app that captures some-
one’s oral history through
prompted questions. After your
grandmother has answered a
litany of questions about her
childhood, marriage and signifi-
cant life events, for example, her
voice will be converted into an
audio bot that will be accessible
through a smartphone or virtual
assistant.Because these devices increas-
ingly function like communal
computers in hundreds of mil-
lions of kitchens and living
ro oms, and their usage rates are
rising, Vlahos believes they lend
themselves to the sort of casual
interaction with a deceased rela-
tive that many people crave.
Like Netflix or Blue Apron, the
company will use a subscription
model, one that allows users to
interact with a relative’s bot for a
monthly fee. With proper con-
sent, nonrelatives can also pur-
chase a subscription to a bot.Vlahos said he considers the
service an “interactive memoir”
and expects it will be especially
appealing to customers between
the ages of 30 and 50 who want
to preserve their parents’ history
— and essence — before it’s too
late. The company is developing
virtual profiles for customers
and expects to unveil its public
app over the next year.
“A udio recordings tend to lan-
guish on y our hard drive,” Vlahos
said, “and when in your daily life
do you really have time to sit
down and watch eight hours ofvideo recordings from Christmas
of ’83?
“Now imagine being able to
stand in the kitchen and call out
to your deceased mother and
have her answer right back,” he
said. “There’s just something
about being able to hear our
loved ones’ voices.”
Edward Saatchi, the chief ex-
ecutive of Fable, a company in
the process of creating virtual
beings, said interacting with dig-
ital humans is not only an inevi-
tability, but also the next leap
forward in how humans interact
with technology.
“Imagine a future in which
Alexa or Siri is a character with a
face and a life and a voice that
allows you to interact with them
one-on-one,” Saatchi said, argu-
ing that virtual beings will even-
tually replace Android and iOS.
“You’ll be able to play games,
order food, spend time or learn a
language with a virtual being —
or do anything else you might
normally do with a friend.”
Ye t, to perfect virtual beings,
companies such as Eternime and
HereAfter will have to begin
chipping away at a problem that
has confounded computer scien-
tists for decades: enabling
“multi-turn conversations” be-
tween humans and machines.
Unlike ordering a pizza — sim-
ple, short and guided by a specif-
ic objective — a multi-turn con-
versation is free-flowing and
spontaneous, drifting among un-
related topics and using the
nearly infinite variety of natural
language the way conversations
between people often do.
Vlahos says that the more
fluidly his product communi-
cates with users, the more it
absorbs the tonality and ticks of
the person it is channeling, the
more authentic intimacy it con-
veys.
At the same time, knowing
that computers are years, if not
decades, away from handling
back-and-forth conversations as
well as people do, he aims for the
more realistic short-term goal of
enabling legacy bots to share
stories about a person’s life on
command.
David Kessler, author of the
upcoming book “Finding Mean-
ing: The Sixth Stage of Grief,”
said intimacy could benefit some
people grieving the loss of a
loved one, but it might pose a
serious problem for others.
With grieving clients, Kessler
said, the goal is for them to
remember the departed with
more love than pain. The goal
isn’t necessarily for them to re-
linquish their grief, but to inte-
grate their suffering into their
lives in a healthy way. Could a
dead relative, conversing
through a Google Home, aid in
that goal?
“I think so,” he said. “Grief is a s
individual as our fingerprint.
There will be some people who
find this tool comforting and
some people who would never
use it, because it doesn’t feel like
their loved one to them.”
His only concern: making sure
vulnerable people understand
they’re dealing with “an artificial
reminder of Dad, not the contin-
uation of the actual relationship
with your father.”
As he enters his autumnal
years on the golf courses of
Southern California, reflecting
on a life fully lived, Kaplan — the
former globe-trotting journalist
turned robot prototype — said he
isn’t seeking immortality. How-
ever, he does see another benefit
to becoming a virtual person,
one informed by his many years
as a purveyor of compelling fic-
tion.
“In the end, every story is
about trying to help us find out
who we are and where we came
from, and this is no different,” he
said. “This is about history for
me, a kind of limited immortality
that creates an intimate personal
experience for my future rela-
tives who want to know where
they came from.”
[email protected]By creating ‘digital humans,’ people could talk to the dead
BRINSON+BANKS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Andrew Kaplan, 78, has agreed to become “AndyBot,” a virtual person who will be immortalized in the cloud for years to come.
Here, he poses for a portrait at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Kaplan considers the effort a way to extend intimate family bonds
over multiple generations: “I have a son in his 3 0s, and I’m hoping this will be of some value to him and his children someday.”“Imagine being able to stand in the kitchen and call out to your deceased mother
and have her answer right back.”
James Vlahos, co-founder of HereAfter, a start-up creating virtual peopleBY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHAThe U.S. surgeon general
raised a national alarm Thursday
about the use of marijuana
among pregnant women and
youths at a time when 33 states
and the District have broadly
legalized the substance’s use in
some form.
Citing greater access and in-
creased potency of available
products, Jerome M. Adams and
Health and Human Services Sec-
retary Alex Azar said the drug
“carries more risk than ever” and
announced that they would be
starting a public awareness cam-
paign on social media about the
effect it can have on the develop-
ing brain.
The initiative, they said, is
funded by President Trump, who
donated his second-quarter
presidential salary of $100,000 to
the effort. It’s a drop in the bucket
compared with his personal for-
tune but underscores how much
of a priority addiction and sub-
stance abuse is for the adminis-
tration, they said.
“We need to be clear: Some
states’ laws on marijuana may
have changed. But the science has
not. And federal law has not,”
Azar said.
Azar also put his weight behind
efforts to increase marijuana re-
search — which is limited by the
fact that there is one institution, a
facility at t he University of Missis-
sippi, where it can be cultivatedfor scientific use because of the
plant’s status as a Schedule 1
controlled substance under fed-
eral law. Azar said the work
should look at both the risks and
the potential benefits of marijua-
na use, and that he had “very
constructive” conversations with
the Justice Department and the
Drug Enforcement Administra-
tion about how to do this.
Those talks led the DEA to
announce this week that it would
begin to process other pending
applications.
U.S. health officials said they
have been especially alarmed be-
cause the potency of tetrahydro-
cannabinol (THC) in the new
professionally grown strains of
the marijuana plant is muchhigher than it was in the past. In
1995, when marijuana was mostly
smoked, the amount was about
4 percent, they said. It’s now 12 to
25 percent. Marijuana is also now
available in even more-concen-
trated forms — including cookies
and oils — where the concentra-
tion can be as high as 80 to
90 percent.
“This isn’t your mother’s mari-
juana,” Adams said at the news
conference announcing the ini-
tiative.
Although the officials said they
recognize the potential medicinal
uses of marijuana’s components
— indeed, low doses of the mari-
juana extract cannabidiol is now
being used to treat seizures in
some forms of epilepsy — theyemphasized that frequent mari-
juana use during adolescence can
affect attention, memory, deci-
sion-making and motivation, and
that those youths are more likely
to miss classes, do poorly in
school and drop out.
In pregnant women, marijua-
na use can affect the developing
fetus’s brain and is linked to lower
birth weight. Health officials also
emphasized that the American
College of Obstetricians and Gy-
necologists discourage the use of
marijuana after pregnancy be-
cause THC is transmitted in
breast milk.
Adams said he has been travel-
ing around the country, and in
states such as Colorado and Cali-
fornia, where both medical andrecreational marijuana use is le-
gal, clinicians, parents and other
community members have ap-
proached him about the problem.
Marijuana is the most widely
used illicit drug among youths
ages 12 to 17, according to the 2018
National Survey on Drug Use and
Health.
“Over and over again, I hear a
great and rising concern about
the rapid normalization of mari-
juana use and the impact that
false perception of its safety is
having on young people and on
pregnant women,” Adams said.
The health advisory is only the
second one issued by Adams. The
first, in December, involved
youths’ use of e-cigarettes.
[email protected]Surgeon general warns against marijuana use by pregnant women, youths