Transcend 2023

How will AI change our relationship with death? For my Master's thesis, I created Transcend, a speculative business set in 2029 that lets you design your avatar or someone else’s while alive and resurrect it later as a subscription service, accessible through a chatbot, an interactive deepfake, and in VR.

My best friend lost her dad very young. She's an artist now, trying to reconstruct him from fragments. It made me realize: what if my mom died suddenly?
Dedicated to her, we built my mother's avatar together, so she controls how she's preserved.

History & Inspiration

ELIZA (1966), one of the first chatbots, simulated human empathy through scripted conversation, exposing how easily we can project emotion onto machines.

Dumbledore’s Pensieve in Harry Potter was conceptualized as a way to store and relive memories, turning remembrance into a tangible, replayable experience.

The film Ex Machina (2014) depicted the robot Ava's wetware brain as a network of cells in a gel, imagining consciousness as ever-evolving rather than frozen code.

The Library of Alexandria (3rd century BCE) centralized human knowledge and memory, envisioning wisdom that could outlive its creators.

Why 2029?

Ray Kurzweil predicted 2029 as the year AI achieves human-level pattern recognition. His insight was that consciousness was about hierarchical patterns of thought and not replicating 86 billion neurons

By 2029, we could preserve not just what someone said, but how they thought.
By 2029, digital necromancy will probably be a common practice - just because we can do something, should we?

E.O. Wilson warned,

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

How it Works

Built using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) on top of GPT-4 with LangChain and LlamaIndex, the system stores and indexes 15 years of communication between my mother and me: WhatsApp messages, emails, voice notes, and letters

This allows the avatar to retrieve memories quickly and respond with context and personality, and nuance. My mom texts me differently than my sister or my dad, uses specific emoji patterns, and has different tones for different people.

She helped train it by correcting responses, adding emojis, and explaining why certain advice didn't sound quite right.

Transcend's onboarding also asks questions like:
Do you want your avatar to age with you?
Who gets access to your data if you die suddenly?
Should your avatar live forever?

You should decide these things while you're alive, not leave them to others' grief.

Creating a convincing simulation requires three core components

Voice: speech patterns, tone, rhythm
Personality: how they think, respond, and relate to different people
Appearance: face, expressions, movements

Transcend guides you through building all three.

Resurrection as a monthly subscription service

Practical Applications
1. Personalized education at scale

One-on-one tutoring improves learning by 2 standard deviations (Bloom, 1984), but doesn't scale. Imagine learning physics from Feynman, poetry from Maya Angelou, or cooking heirloom recipes from your own grandmother.

2. Cultural Preservation
Dying languages, indigenous knowledge systems, and cultural practices could all be preserved through the minds of people who lived them. Not history written by victors, but first-person accounts from the people who were there.

3. Democratic Transparency
Political candidates could have publicly accessible avatars trained on their policies. Citizens could query their decision-making patterns directly: "How would you vote on this bill?" based on actual reasoning, not campaign promises.

4. Employee Knowledge
When employees leave, tons of knowledge walk out the door. Avatars could preserve expertise, letting companies consult their best problem-solvers after they've quit.

Conclusions

Every culture has a distinct way to honor the dead, and most attempt to reflect the life of the deceased.

We're entering an age where death becomes designable.
Transcend explores what that means and how it should be done.

An autobiography is always better than a biography, even a virtual one.
Exert your agency by creating your virtual avatar while you’re alive