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)