Hacker News Reader

Comment by AbbasHaiderAli | Hacker News Reader

Wow, impressive results! Already a few examples in the comments of what bad actors could do this tech. I wanted to share an example of something good.

I lost my dad about 6 years ago after a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis and a 3 month rapid diagnosis. I have some, but not a lot of video content of him from over the years. My mom still misses him terribly so for her 60th birthday I tried to splice together an audio message and greeting from her saying what I thought he would have said.

The work was rough and nowhere near what this Google project could produce. She listens to that poor facsimile every year for her birthday. It's therapeutic for her. With some limits for her mental health of course, I'm sure she would love to hear my dad again with this level of fidelity.

And so would I.

View on HN

When I was doing a computer repair: I remember a woman coming in with a digital answering machine; the kind that stored its recordings in volatile flash. During a thunderstorm the night prior the machine lost power, and subsequently lost all the stored recordings. As it happens some of those lost recordings included messages from the woman's late mother.

That moment has stuck with me for many, many years. The heartbreak on her face, combined with my own frustration of knowing that no amount of luck (or skill) will ever be able to flip the bits of that flash chip back to a permutation which contains samples of her loved one's voice.

Fast forward to the present, my own grandmother passed away shortly after the start of 2019. I was able to salvage some of the many voicemails she had left me over the years, despite having had probably five or six cellphones during that period. Why? I used Google Voice, which is part of their Google Takeout data exfiltration program. I was able to download all those voicemails as MP3s, neatly categorized by caller. My grandma was very terse, so most of them are exactly the same: "Robert, can you please call me?", but in spite of that each one is unique and precious to me. A lot of developers think about getting data into their platform, but it seems to me that not as many think about users getting their data, sometimes precious & irreplaceable, back out of the platform.

Thanks so much for sharing this story--this never even occurred to us when we created Google Takeout back in the day!

-Fitz

My pet project I will likely never have the resources to work on would be AI-generated 3D virtual environments based on old photos / videos that you could navigate in VR and relive long lost memories

I'd pay a good amount of money to be able to relive certain experiences from my childhood with that level of immersion

Philip K Dick wrote about people going to commune with artificial personality constructs of their deceased loved ones.

Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't remember which book it was in. Maybe someone who's read him more recently can remember.

Update: Apparently, lots of other people wrote about this too, but PKD wrote about this before any of the ones mentioned so far, as he wrote about this in the 1950's or 60's. I'm not sure if he was the absolute first, however. So if anyone knows of any earlier references, it would be interesting to learn about them.

There was also a Black Mirror episode.

It’s also present in the Revelation Space series, Neuromancer, Red Dwarf, and Star Trek.

Ubik? Though that is not about artificial personality constructs, it's about communicating with loved ones in half-dead states.

This idea crops up in a few of his novels and stories, but I think it’s most fleshed-out in Ubik, yeah.

Under the hood they are all about religious Gnosticism and the physical universe as a false facade to the "true" universe. VALIS is a pretty good explication as well as a really good book; if you are into mental illness+theology, only then is his Exegesis a good read

Very belatedly, yes, VALIS is strange and wonderful.

This is making me want to re-read some PKD!

Yes, Ubik has half-life states.

But I'm thinking of a different PKD book where there were actual artificial personality constructs instead.

Don’t know about the Philip K Dick work but William Gibson has this in Neuromancer.

Check out the movie with Jon Hamm, Marjorie Prime, screenplay by Jordan Harrison. Without spoiling too much, there's a company that can create holographic projections of loved ones which a woman's family gives to her as a gift which is a hologram of her deceased husband, but when he was a young man. The interesting part, narratively, is that while the holograms are near perfect physical recreations, their personalities and memories must be trained by those who knew them, family/friends which raises the question of how we're perceived in fragmentary and contradictory pieces depending on whose doing the training and the amalgamation of a person that's ultimately constructed from these parallax accounts. The writing is actually quite strong and the only scifi aspect is the holograms so I wouldn't say there's much of scifi crutch. I know it's not PKD and there are similar Black Mirror episodes, but I thought the drama itself was robust and displayed the range of Jon Hamm to be someone other than Don Draper.

This movie is available on Amazon Prime.

It's not bad, but my recommendation is to go into it with the expectation of a Black Mirror episode rather than something you might pay to see in the cinema.

When I interviewed Ray Kurzweil we talked about the obvious-in-hindsight insight that his life’s work was essentially trying to build an AI to bring his father back to life.

Except no matter how good it is, it will only reinforce that it’s not real and that he’s gone. Perhaps that’s the therapy he needs to move on?

Note: this is different from listening to recordings from the actual person.

Having loved ones die is one of life’s universal terrible qualities.

I think a lot of people's passions are driven by a hole in their heart, that they hope their work will help fill somehow. I suspect that no small amount of the enthusiasm for XR is due to a deep and abiding desire to be someone else, somewhere else, among the people developing or early-adopting for it. Of course, it doesn't have to be so high-tech; much non-profit or social work is prompted personal experience with the presence, or lack thereof, of the service being rendered.

In the end, I don't know if any of that works. But what's being subscribed doesn't seem too far outside the norm. Deprivation often leads to desperation for even a taste, however imperfect it may be.

I think it would be cathartic to talk to someone you trusted but who is now gone. There's been decision points over the last few years where I would love to have just said my thoughts out loud to my dad and just have him nod and ask a couple of open ended questions so I could get it out. No specific guidance needed, just his particular style of listening.

Clearly losing someone and being able to deal with it is an important life skill but just as we build technology powered aids for other situations, I don't think this would be any different

"I think it would be cathartic to talk to someone you trusted but who is now gone."

It would be cathartic, but in this case you wouldn't be talking to them but to a computer, who (at best) is pretending to be them.

I think it's kind of creepy, when you really think about it, and it reminds me of the aversion the creator of Eliza had to his creation when he found out that people were spilling their guts out to it and treating it as a real person.

Which isn't to say that it can't be helpful to talk to something that's not a real person (and especially not a formerly living person you once knew) can't be healing. But if people get confused by these machines in to thinking the machines are actually people close to them that died and are now living again, that will make them vulnerable to some really serious manipulation and delusion.

Fair point

I'm deeply sorry for your loss. Thanks for sharing your story.

Beautiful. Thanks for sharing. It's good to point out the positive potential uses as well as the negative.

This podcast explores how similar tech is used to give voice back to people who have lost it due to voice impairment. Basically allowing all the people using machines that sound like the classic Hawking computer voice to have their own voice instead.

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/15/741827437/finding-your-voice-...

It could also be used for recreating voices for people that have lost theirs, like Roger Ebert. I think he benefited by having so much of his voice already recorded, this would make it much easier for regular people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMyxgSLESz8

Great use case!

I'm imagining Siri with the voice of your partner.

Yeah, you probably don't want to mixing up some habits of how you talk to a digital assistant and the person you love.

My partner and I frequently ask each other things, to which the response is "I bet you could google that." Seems fitting :)

Either I would wind up being extra nice to a digital assistant or being curt with my partner :)

Sorry for your loss, thank you for providing an optimistic example.

That was part of the original idea behind the Infibond start-up in Israel. Not clear how real it ever was.

https://sifted.eu/articles/infibond-investigation-israeli-st...

Would be interesting to have a community where people looking to be comforted by their loved one's voice would post whatever snippet of recording they have, then others would listen and see if they know someone who has a similar voice and have them record a message.

Reminds me of the LifeAfter podcast: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/panoply/the-message

Reply on news.ycombinator.com