I love being a cartoonist because I can travel anywhere. I can visit historical artifacts and make improvements. I can voyage to mythical lands and solve problems.
(Laughter)
I can bring objects to life, and I can make those objects think and talk. And I can send those objects wherever I want them to go.
I became a cartoonist to travel through space and time, and I became a graphic memoirist because the place I wanted to go was the past. I come from a legacy of dramatic stories and lost characters. My grandmother, Lily, on my mother's side, was born in Warsaw, Poland, the oldest of four sisters. She was 13 in 1939, when Nazi bombs razed her home and her family was sealed to starve inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Eventually, her father encouraged her to slip through a hole in the wall, and she survived the Holocaust on her own, hiding her Jewish identity. This is the subject of my first book. I wondered: What did my grandmother’s lost home and lost family look like? Her parents, her grandmother and her sisters, they are all gone without a trace.
My father's parents were luckier. They were also Jewish, and they both fled Austria at the start of the war. My father's father, Fred, was a pianist and conductor. In 1937, the year before the Nazis marched into Austria, he was 26, and he conducted a magnificent choral concert at a music hall in Vienna. A wealthy American woman in the audience was so impressed with his performance that she later agreed to sponsor his visa to the US. So music saved his life. But three decades later, Fred died of heart disease. I never met him. While alive, Fred meticulously preserved the documents of his life, a response to the threat of erasure he fled in Europe. And for decades after his father’s death, my father continued this preservation project. This is the subject of my second book.
You might know my father, Ray Kurzweil, as an inventor and futurist. You should also know that he's a person with an extraordinary sense of humor.
["Can I call you an Uber?" "Sure."]
["You're an Uber."]
(Laughter)
Good one dad.
(Laughter)
And although he's dedicated his mind to the future, his life is full of the past. My father has worked for decades on natural language processing. And several years ago, he realized that if we married AI with my grandfather's writing, we could build a chatbot that writes in my grandfather's voice. Back in 2018, this seemed very sci-fi. But rather than ushering in our demise, this project helped me realize that AI could actually help us ward off annihilation by animating the legacies of our families and our cultures. I wanted to talk to my grandfather because he, like me, was an artist. I wondered: Could I get to know him? Could I even come to love him, even though our lifespans didn’t overlap?
So I got involved. This chatbot needed language from my grandfather, as much as could be found. So I, with some assistance, set about finding his words and transcribing them. This was a selective chatbot, meaning it responded to questions with answers from the pool of sentences that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life. The more examples of Fred's writing we could find, the more dynamic the experience of chatting with the bot would feel. Sometimes this transcription task proved challenging. But the more time I spent with the symbols of my grandfather's life, the more easily I could decode them.
Finally, after much anticipation, I sat down to chat with this new intelligence: an algorithm commanding over 600 typed pages of letters, lectures, notes, essays and other written documents from the grandfather I never met. When I asked about Fred's dreams, he told me about the challenge of keeping his new orchestra afloat. When I asked about Fred's anxieties, I learned about the stress of being a new father while working so hard. When I asked about the meaning of life, Fred wrote about the joy of working with other musicians in pursuit of beauty, and he wrote about the highest aims of art. I asked again about the meaning of life because isn't that really the best question for a robot? And Fred's second answer was much simpler, but even better.
["Love."]
Some of these answers felt familiar to me. I remembered seeing them in the archive, but the words gained impact through surprise and the role-play of conversation. I could identify patterns in my grandfather's life and patterns across generations, because I was also an artist trying to make it in New York City. And I also believe the meaning of life is art and connection and love.
I had wondered if this project would feel like a resurrection. But rather than bringing my grandfather from the past into the present, it felt like I was the one time traveling, visiting him for a moment at different points in his life. And this kind of time travel didn't feel like sci-fi. It felt like the kind of imaginative travel I do when I'm cartooning. When I'm cartooning, I'm always thinking about how I could possibly represent a person fully. And the answer is: I can’t. Similarly, I know how many aspects of my grandfather can't be captured by digital text alone. There's all those quivers in his handwriting and what they denote about the sensations in his body. There's his body, how it moved and how it felt. There's his music and all the ineffable aspects of his performance. And of course, there's everything he thought but didn't write down. What would we have to do to be able to capture all of this?
I may fail as an artist to fully represent a person's constantly evolving complexity, but I can ask what features of a person are essential to who they are across a lifetime. The puzzle of personal identity is one of our oldest philosophical questions, so I'm not here to solve that one for you, I'm just a cartoonist after all.
[Robot cat passes Turing test]
I do believe that we, maybe not cats, but we are more than our bodies. That the projects and impressions we leave behind are a part of our essential selves. And I think AI has a special role to play in the mission of memory.
I did not come to see the chatbot of my grandfather as replacing my grandfather. I came to see it as one way to interact with his legacy. As somebody who has spent their whole life trying to document people, I can assure you that people are much bigger and weirder than any one depiction or any one moment in time can possibly evoke. And I can also assure you that people don't just disappear when they die.
AI swirls our conception of time and space. It can remix and extend our identities. Our own digital archives are growing beyond belief, and we need a framework for understanding technologies of representation. So I offer you mine.
Just like the comics I've drawn, about the characters in my life, these technologies are animated portraits. They are one part of our true immortal selves. Seen this way, AI, like cartooning and all good artistic endeavors, could help us appreciate the vastness of humanity -- if we let it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
