#24 James Vlahos: The Quest For Artificial Immortality

Explicit content warning

01/09/19 • 36 min

How far would you be willing to go to somehow preserve the memory of someone you lost? When James Vlahos found out his father was dying of lung cancer, he set out to create a chatbot fueled by a treasure trove of interviews with his dad, and artificial intelligence software. The end result is the Dadbot, an interactive and compelling program that questions if artificial immortality might actually exist.

Listen as Vlahos describes the experience of interviewing his father during the final months of his life, and how an early interest in computers as a kid - and a New York Times Magazine article about a talking Barbie doll - helped bring the Dadbot to life. The bot says the kinds of things James’ father would say, it cracks the same jokes, it even sometimes sings songs, using audio clips from the oral history interviews.

And while the technology at play might still be in its infancy and certainly has its critics, Vlahos suspects that the idea of artificial immortality - when we use modern technology to better preserve the memory of those we’ve lost and even interact with their avatars after the real people are gone - will be a very real part of our future.

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#23 Schwan Park: My Son, The Rubik's Cube Champion

Prior to the birth of his first son, the only things Schwan Park knew about autism were gleaned from watching Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. But after he and his wife realized something was different about the development of their son Max, Park reluctantly pushed himself to learn more about the symptoms of autism, and ultimately to accept a new reality for his family. “It’s sort of like you’re opening a door and trying to find something,” Park says, “but you really hope it’s not in there.”

But at the age of 10 years old, the Park family found their life line. Enter the Rubik’s Cube, the 1980s-era toy that frustrated puzzle solvers threw away years ago. Max’s interest in solving the cube as fast as possible - it’s now a growing and feverish international sport called speedcubing - served as an essential ingredient for Max’s therapy sessions, where he worked on social skills that had largely eluded him for years.

Now 16 years old, Max is the sport’s reigning world champion, solving cubes in just seconds and earning fame and celebrity status among his peers. After years spent trying to solve the puzzle, it’s clear now that the cube itself is the solution.

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#25 John Vanek: Finding My Biological Father

What if you spent the first three decades of your life building a relationship with your father, and then one day, you found out he wasn’t the only father you had?

There are two guests on this episode of Paternal - one is 33-year-old John Vanek, a husband and father of two young girls living in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And the other is his biological father, Dr. Bruce A. Olmscheid, a physician who lives nearly 2,000 miles away in Southern California. Neither man knew the other one existed for almost 30 years.

But a shocking reveal from his parents and a persistent interest in science, history and genealogy led John down a path that led him to the truth about his family, his own origin story, and the man who is his father.

Well, he’s still working on that last part.