EPISODE 7 | Simulation = Memory + Emotion
Amy and Ray Kurzweil in conversation
[Whirring sound, as if from an old film reel, is heard in the background]
AMY KURZWEIL: Something that strikes me about the theme of simulation is it gets kind of a bad rap. The idea of a simulation, often, people will say, “it's not the real thing,” or “there's something cheap or degraded about a simulation,” but I think both of us maybe relate to the concept of simulation in a more positive way.
I am Amy Kurzweil. I'm a writer and a cartoonist. I'm the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. I'm also working on another graphic memoir, which is called Artificial: A Love Story, and it features my father and his father, who I never met, and the themes of artificial intelligence, simulation of identities and love and family.
RAY KURZWEIL: I'm Ray Kurzweil. I've been involved in artificial intelligence, actually, for 60 years. When I started that nobody had even heard of a computer let alone artificial intelligence.
AMY KURZWEIL: I'm also the daughter of Ray Kurzweil in case that wasn't clear from our shared last name. [laughs]
RAY KURZWEIL: Really? Wow. Amazing.
AMY KURZWEIL: My new book is in progress. The through line of the book is that my father has this storage unit where he saved decades of documents from his father, who I never met, who was a musician in Vienna, and he fled Vienna in 1938. His life was very kind of climatically saved by this American benefactor who had heard him conduct a concert.
[Emotive, almost inspirational, orchestra music plays]
And she mentioned to him, “oh, if you ever, if you ever need anything, reach out to me in America,” and that was 1937. And very soon after was the Anschluss, and, as a Jew, he needed to get out of Vienna. And so, this was this really dramatic story that I grew up hearing about this grandfather, who I never knew, who we have all these pictures of him.
And he's so Regal looking. We have these dramatic, black and white photos of him conducting music. And now, hearing these stories about him, he just became kind of a mythical figure to me. And this dramatic idea of, as an artist, your life is sort of saved by your own art just really captivated me.
If this woman hadn't heard him play and wasn't so moved by his music, he may not have had a way out of Vienna. And so that's always been a really moving story for me. And then, the idea that my father has saved all these sort of artifacts from my grandfather's life in the storage unit, because my grandfather died in 1970 of heart disease.
And he died relatively young, which is why I never met him. And so, he left behind all these letters and ledgers. He was very meticulous recording his financial life because, I think, you had a pretty stressful financial life as an artist. There's a lot there and there's also a lot missing.
And I just have found that that experience of wading through his documents and asking the question, “can I know this person that I've never met?”—that's been a really interesting experience for me. So then, enter the impetus of the book, which is that my father collected all the writings from my grandfather and entered them into a chat bot.
The algorithm searches through the writing of the person and provides you with answers to questions. So, the algorithm does understand your question in a sophisticated way, and it returns passages from the person based on all the documents that it has. And so, I've interacted with this chat bot and I've also, of course, interacted with the documents themselves because I was one of the people who actually entered these documents.
[Sound of typing is heard in the background]
All the handwriting that first I couldn't read and then I figured out how to read it and then I typed it into the computer.
So, I was both a part of building the chat bot and also someone who's interacted with it. So, the question of the book is, “to what extent do I know this person who's not around? And how do I know him? Do I know him through his written artifacts? Do I know him through my father? Do I know him through the AI experience that I am having?” And then, swirling around with that question, “are these other memories and reflections from my life?”
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, I've been actually trying to emulate intelligence since the beginning of my career. My first project was actually to create something that would compose music. And I started this actually around 1963, so, that's over 55 years ago.
[Inspirational orchestra music fades in]
AMY KURZWEIL: From the beginning of your career, it seems that you've been thinking about technology as a way to not only simulate what humans do, but actually improve upon what humans do.
RAY KURZWEIL: I've always hated the idea of artificial intelligence. It's challenging if you actually achieve it. It's not real; it's artificial. What we're actually trying to do is get over the artificial aspect, achieve something that's real intelligence. And really doing that now, creating things I can actually write, for example, language. You can ask, for example, GPT3 a question, and it’ll actually answer you in a way a human would.
AMY KURZWEIL: GPT3 is an algorithm that basically can write about anything, and you give it any question.
Ray Kurzweil: You can also actually give it a sample of a particular person and it will emulate that person. That's a very good example of simulation and, really, an example of what artificial intelligence is trying to achieve.
[Off kilter electronic sounds, as if from a computer running complex calculations, is heard in the background]
AMY KURZWEIL: So, one of the features of the chat bot of Fred Kurzweil's that I've interacted with is that it does not create new language. Something interesting that I've experimented with in my book is myself playing the role of an algorithm that might create new language for Fred based on my deep understanding of how Fred would talk, which, I think, part of the argument of my book is making a bit of an analogy between an artist and an algorithm.
Algorithms play themselves, a billion times, in order to perfect itself. And I think there's a version of that, metaphorically, I'm doing as an artist and writer, that I am going over and over and over things as a way to perfect my understanding of the world and my understanding of myself.
So, to be more specific about that with this book about my grandfather, I am reading his language and then I'm processing in my internal computer, which I don't understand how my brain works, but I'm processing his language.
And then, I'm able to then spit out things he could have said that he didn't actually say, and I'm also able to spit out things he did say because I have all of that recorded and written down. And that is this way in which I'm sort of acting like an algorithm, that I'm thinking about all the possible versions of what he could have said, but I'm also thinking about what it meant, which is not necessarily something that the algorithms are doing yet, but they could, one day, think about meaning.
So, your father is not around to fact check my book about him and he's not around to fact check a potential algorithm that might take liberties with his language. I think about that a lot because, so far, I've only written books that involve characters who can fact check what I share about them, and sometimes have strong opinions about it.
And I try to ethically integrate those strong feelings about their representation. But Fred can't do that. And I'm conscious of that as I'm writing this book, and it's difficult to know what choices to make. I'm curious what your experience is like relating to that chat bot. Does it remind you of your father? Does it feel, sometimes, like it is him or how does it strike you?
RAY KURZWEIL: He didn't actually speak that much, but the dialogues we have do sound like him.
AMY KURZWEIL: I mean, I looked up the definition of simulation just to sort of wrap my mind around all the different things that word means. One of the definitions was imitation for the purpose of study. And I think about writing and creating and making art as this simulation for the purpose of study or for the purpose of insight.
So, you create this new world and you walk around in it or draw around in it, think around in it. Sometimes the world that you create is a reflection of your memory, or it's a reflection of things you think about, or it's fictional. For me, the definition, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is like a little blurry.
But, you enter this world and then you see what's possible within it. And memory I think, functions that way for humans. Memory is both for imagining the future and for recollecting the past. Part of the purpose of memory is to imagine what could have happened.
[The sound of pages turning is heard in the background]
RAY KURZWEIL: But, I mean, art is a way of acting as a simulator because we're trying to recreate something. I mean, if you have a book, it's not just paper. You're actually trying to go beyond the paper to actually create a story that someone who really feels like they're in, and that goes beyond the book itself.
It's the same with music. Music tries to emulate emotion. And if you actually get into the music, you don't just hear sounds. You hear emotion that goes beyond the sounds.
[Off Kilter, binary computer sounds play]
AMY KURZWEIL: Something people might not know about you, dad is that you majored in creative writing in college, and you actually wanted to be a poet at some point in your life, which I love that detail. And it's actually something I learned because I was in this storage unit, looking at documents that you'd saved and found this letter you wrote to your grandfather where you're arguing passionately for your future career as a poet, which you then shifted a little bit and decided to pursue writing and technology.
But I'm just curious what you see as a sort of relationship between writing and the other things that you do. Why were you attracted to poetry? What choice did you make with writing in your life and why?
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, I mean, I did generalize poetry into writing in general, and writing is a way of inventing using the technologies of the future.
AMY KURZWEIL: Yeah, writing as a place to imagine your inventions without having to actually invent them. [Laughs]
RAY KURZWEIL: So, I can create something that will be a possibility 10 years from now, 20, 30 years from now. So, the fiction, I can actually react to the technology and see how it actually impacts our experiences as human beings.
[White noise and glitching sounds from a computer are heard in the background]
AMY KURZWEIL: I think the impulse to save documents and to save items of people that we love is a kind of recreation. A theme that's come up for me as I've been exploring these topics is just really seeing something like a chat bot or an avatar of somebody who's passed away. That feels a lot less strange to me than it used to.
It really feels like an extension of things that we've always done. I have some concerns about it, but it feels more familiar to me the idea that we might do that because it just feels like a natural impulse to save and organize. And we don't typically understand AI well enough to really understand what the sort of ingredients are in recreating voices.
But I think it's safe to say that we also don't really understand arts and writing well enough to always know kind of what the ingredients are that go into a fictional character or a non-fiction character on the page.
RAY KURZWEIL: Some of this stuff really goes to the very essence of what you're writing about. There's a whole different way of creating a personality that they will get what that original personality was like. That didn’t exist a year ago.
[The sound of typing joins the computer noises]
AMY KURZWEIL: Yeah, I think it's coming quickly. The way that people will interact with loved ones who are gone because we didn't have social networks for the previous generation. And, I am going to enter old age and my friends will pass away, and their entire adult lives will be on the internet. And that's a real paradigm shift for what it means to leave the world.
[Typing heard until fade out]