I’m sharing this now because it’s going behind a paywall soon. (I actually suggested that to the gentleman, so blame me.) And I am genuinely gobsmacked at what’s possible here.  

Remember cryogenics? That science fiction idea about preserving someone’s brain or head. Usually belonging to an egotistical, money-hungry, power-obsessed male. All in the hope that future technology could jolt it back to life and let it continue terrorizing the earth. Setting aside my colourful bias and the legitimate medical discoveries yet to be made, I could never come up with a satisfying answer for why regular brains deserved preservation.  

AI has changed that calculation entirely.   Just as photographs and videos let us preserve the memories of people we love, AI can now preserve the thinking of the people worth learning from. Not their faces. Their minds.  

We’ve all encountered chatbots. The next level is something very different: an artificial intelligence that speaks to you in the actual person’s voice with the same inflections, pauses, and verbal tics AND holds a genuine two-way conversation on any topic you choose. You know that dinner party question: which one or two famous people would you most want to sit across from? The Pope, Einstein, or some towering historical or political figure?  

What if you could actually have that conversation? On demand. For a few dollars. I’ve seen clunky versions of business people who’ve shoehorned their ideas into a mediocre bot. Eye-rolling quality. What you’ll hear from Ai Richard is something else completely.  It is proof that the technology has finally caught up to the ambition.  

My mind races. I’d love to ask Queen Victoria, Margaret Thatcher, Stephen Hawking, and Einstein what the foundation of their logic actually was. Whether they believed they were right at the time. Whether they could see, or refused to see, the unintended consequences rippling through the world today. And imagine the conversations we could have with the dead presidents of the corporations that gutted our health (with tobacco, sugar, and ultra-processed food) and our planet (the oil and gas barons). No spin doctors. No PR team. Just the thinking, preserved.  

If we’ve learned anything since 1999, it’s that nothing ever dies on the internet. The way AI is going, we might add that everything good and bad can now be preserved indefinitely. That means we need to choose carefully.  What and whom we save.  

My honest opinion? Very few of us have ideas in our heads worth preserving past maybe a decade. But instead of mediocre presidents and politicians and their vanity projects called libraries, we could do something genuinely useful.  We could give the next generation access to the smartest thinking ever.  

What do you think?