When I lived in China I frequently had the chance to talk to people who experienced an event that I had only read about. The past 70 years in China have been rather… eventful, and I’d talk to some older person and find out they had first-hand stories about the Cultural Revolution, or occasionally even the Chinese civil war. The difference between what’s written in history books and people’s personal recollections were often stark!
When the COVID pandemic was looming but its significance was still only being talked about in the West by a handful of iconoclastic investors, I really wished I could talk to someone who had been through the Spanish Flu (or hell, the Black Death!) to get a sense of what it felt like right before the excrement hit the air-conditioning.
But even more than that, I’ve always desperately wished I could talk to my ancestors. I come from a family of weird people—my paternal grandfather was a professor who came west in hope of becoming a lumberjack, and then ended up as the only Jewish commercial salmon fishing captain in a fleet of Sicilians. My ancestor several more generations back was W.T. Walker, who bought and outfitted a ship so dilapidated that no one would insure it, and took it on a whaling voyage that turned 200k of 2020 dollars into 4.7 million, a record profit in the industry. On my mom’s side my grandpa did work for the State Department that to this day no one in my family seems to really understand, and both my mom and my dad were very active in the civil rights and free speech movements.
Of these people, the only ones I’ve been able to talk to are my mom and dad. But recently, it would appear that the same thing will not be true for my own child. The intense work on artificial intelligence software has produced GPT-3, something which you can read a ton about here. In a nutshell, it’s software which can take a body of text, and produce more text in the same vein—so if you feed it a bunch of interviews, it will be able to answer (sometimes nonsensically, sometimes profoundly) questions that were never asked in the original text.
However, what GPT-3 needs to function is a (preferably huge) amount of text. So around when the first iteration of GPT was being talked about, I started deliberately interviewing my dad about his life, thoughts, and our family history. I’ve previously been doing it using a combination of voice, text, and note-taking, but I’ve decided to optimize a bit for eventual use in creating a “chat-bot” model that future generations can interact with. I’m also going to start doing the same with my mom, and other older members of my family. I really wish I had thought about this when my grandmas were still around, but I think the old adage about the second best time to plant a tree being right now very much applies here.
This is an investment in a very limited form of immortality for people I care about. In Asia, many families have small shrines to their ancestors in a nook inside or near the home—I imagine my distant offspring having a similar shrine, but inside is a GPT999-trained model of her parents, my parents, and the many intervening generations. Perhaps my distant future family-members will be able to consult us on important matters—or maybe we’ll just be a weird toy that gives them a sense of connectedness. The tech is unlikely to stop getting better—the important thing is to quickly collect the required text now before it’s too late.
In case other people would like to do this too, I’ve written up a quick-and-dirty flow for getting started. If people have improvements on this, please leave them in the twitter comments!
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Get your parent or other interviewee to install WhatsApp. Any chat app that allows you to export txt logs will work fine—I just happen to know WhatsApp does this easily. One caveat is that you can only export 40,000 messages, so you’ll want to do this reasonably frequently, but that’s a lot of messages. If you know of other easy-export chat apps, please reply with them in the comments on Twitter and I’ll add them to this guide.
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Ask your subject about a time in their life you’re interested in! “Where were you born?” “What was it like growing up in $place?” are all good starters.
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Optional but very helpful in my experience: set up a weekly reminder to do 1 hour of interviewing. I use IFTTT to text me a reminder, but you can use whatever works for you.
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If you want to interview someone who doesn’t type well, you can feel totally free to use voice instead and record that to transcribe later. Automatic voice transcription is getting great, but you could always manually transcribe, or pay someone to do so. The important part is to COLLECT THE INFO NOW, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
By the way, if you think this is cool, please retweet it so that future generations have a huge number of personalities from the past to talk to!
A disorganized list of other thoughts I have about this:
- Time stamps mean you can choose to consult the 2020 version of someone, or a later version.
- Worth thinking about how an amalgamation of older selves with newer selves would differ from talking to the current person (a version of me that included a lot of text from younger versions of me would be less mature than a version built just from the most recent “me”)
- Would be cool to find funding to interview people who went through interesting events. The first dot com bubble. The advent of the internet. The first few employees at Twitter or Facebook. Long-serving senators. Veterans of WWII. Black people who lived through the civil rights movement. A close friend offered 500$ to fund someone to interview a specific interesting person—if you have one in mind, please DM your idea to me and I’ll pick one by July 31st and send you funding.
This is a fascinating idea. We don't know if it will work, but we must act now to make it happen. It makes sense. Thanks for sharing.