Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.
Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading it and obsessively finding ways to make it more accurate.
If you weren't able to process your loved one being gone in the first place, how would you ever be able to quit from using the simulation?
Although there is a market for psychics who claim to be able to talk to deceased relatives. Despite them obviously being liars, I wonder what the effect overall is for the customers. Does it help them? And is it because they believe the psychic, e.g. if psychic says, that your loved one would want you to move on and live your best life, perhaps this could alleviate their guilt. But I'm not sure how that would play out with a simulation. Would it have to be simulation's goal to slowly wean them off while hinting them to move on with their life and live their best life.
But if I was to find out I am about to die, I would definitely want to try and build a simulation out of myself, that would then keep DMing the people I knew. I guess either it would have to be activated as marked down in the will, or it would have to be a sort of dead man's switch. I have to reset it monthly or it will have a timer to activate. Once I die, people will keep receiving DMs of the simulated version.
I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.
What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind !
I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!
I think it will end up just being boring. The sad reality is that no one really wants to talk to us, except for a few who are amazing poets or something.
I think what’s more likely is to train models on all material created and ask useful questions for purposes of probate (“when did you buy the house”) because its faster and cheaper than manual research. Or maybe for family history summaries (“how many cousins lived in Colorado in the 1990s and moved to Iowa?”)
At the other side of this equation is the extremists that think this is great. To go full Godwin's law there are certainly people out there that would like for a digital Hitler to stick around forever.
You get that this only played out positively in the movie because the writers/director wanted it to play out that way, right?
Also as others have pointed out it suffers from the hollywood positive-ification of things and never attmempts to take on any serious aspects of the tech. Its just a plot device.
I don’t know if it was healthy, but I did it and I liked it when I did. It made me sad to do it, but I continued.
A managed service for all this surely has a market, imho
Technology is like acupuncture and astrology of the modern west.
Technology isn’t altering physics, it’s operates within the boundaries set by experiment a century ago.
It’s not curtailing human social problems that have existed since forever.
Trade offs in society just like engineering; arguments it saves people from exploitation at home but airplanes and modern tracking enable large scale human trafficking. The yearly resource consumption for yearly phone updates is insane.
If designer drugs that implanted experience made line go up that’s the technology we have. But what we do have makes line go up; why bother with other ideas?
Social zeitgeist is to see consumer tech as allowing us to experience and achieve magical things as with astrology, yet daily life is still right there too. We’re addicted to juicing our own biochemistry with video games because drugs are bad mmmk
Technology is doing things that many people a century ago thought was impossible, in some cases practically, and in other cases even theoretically.
For example, that the chips inside your phone have features significantly smaller than the wavelengths of light used to etch them, which are also in the size range where some of the people involved in the development were sure that quantum mechanical effects would lead to so many electrons tunnelling through insulators as to prohibit reliable logic gates.
Also above liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors, from what I've heard there is no known complete model of that class of superconductors as BCS theory (developed from 1948 to 1957, getting a Nobel Prize in 1972) doesn't explain anything over 30 K… but most people only interact with those superconductors in the form of YouTube videos about them, not even physical toys.
My dad, back when he was alive, gave anecdotes about how much and fast computers changed things over his career. He was born in 1939, and for him "storing all of Shakespeare on a ball bearing" and "have as many digits of pi as you want" were remarkable; and a long-distance phone call meant from Hampshire (in the UK) to Sussex (a county which shares a border with Hampshire), not international, and local phone numbers being typically four digits (although at least one relative just had ten buttons on their phone and each one would call a specific named person, and anything else you'd need the operator). TV (if you could afford it) was black and white (as were the newspapers), and nobody could record anything (though by my time he had managed to pick the third horse of the two-horse race in home taping, as he had a Video 2000 system instead of VHS or Betamax).
He missed the discovery of liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors, and didn't understand public-key encryption (which would've been useful given he worked on IFF systems for Plessey/GEC Marconi).
Radar existed a century ago (under a different name), but magnetrons didn't and RF electronics were terrible. The magnetrons went on to enable microwave ovens.
Nukes didn't exist until he was nearly 6, and the first thermonuclear weapon was detonated just after he turned 13. Artificial satellites were sci-fi until he was 18, and manned spaceflight was sci-fi until he was 21. There are no analogies to these things in the world of astrology or acupuncture.
> It’s not curtailing human social problems that have existed since forever.
Apart from all the diseases we've cured. I finally visited the Mary Rose museum over the holidays, you know what those sailors' bones showed? Rickets, scurvy, broken bones that weren't set right and healed wrong.
Know what else we've done? There are half as many people in abject poverty today than there were a century ago, despite the population going up about 3.5-fold since 1920. "Tech" isn't just your phone and your video games, it's the M-PESA pseudo-banking system letting people use an old Nokia-1100 instead of cash[0].
It's the expansion of rights for women, and more education for everyone, where the pressure came from organisation and coordination which itself was enabled by communication technology.
It's likewise the reporting of My Lai that forced introspection in the USA.
It's thermal remote sensing[1] both in satellites (giving us better weather forecasts and warnings of forest fires) and personal devices (making it cheaper to find where houses need more insulation); it's the microcontrollers in medical devices giving people cybernetic implants for supporting patients with diabetes and for pacemakers, it's the neuroprosthetics in the form of cochlear implants and epilepsy management devices; it's the MRI, CT, and ultrasound scanners; it's the DNA tests, the IVF treatments, the hormonal contraceptives and hormonal supplements for menopause.
And one of the core issues of the human condition is communication: long-distance any-time communication (which is the point of a mobile phone) has gone from a sci-fi fantasy in 1924 to such cheap ubiquity that even in the poorest communities their absence is considered noteworthy.
And then you have things like Google Translate. I'm still surprising and delighting people by showing them a feature first demonstrated over a decade ago — augmented reality live visual translation (although back in 2010 Word Lens was from a separate company, but Google bought them). No more gullible westerners getting "外国变态" as a tattoo thinking it says "asian beauty".
> Trade offs in society just like engineering; arguments it saves people from exploitation at home but airplanes and modern tracking enable large scale human trafficking.
Airplanes? No, and you sound historically (and economically) uninformed for even suggesting that. One of the other places I went in this holiday period was Bristol, where I saw the plinth from which locals have recently toppled and dragged away an unwanted statue commemorating the local philanthropy of a historical slave trader[2]. Planes are about the dumbest possible way to attempt this in the modern world, precisely because of ID requirements on basically all airports.
> The yearly resource consumption for yearly phone updates is insane.
Also no, but that's less nuts than saying airplanes enable large scale human trafficking, there's billions of us and it is normal for people to be very bad with balancing the scale of big numbers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100_2012...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_remote_sensing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston#:~:te....
It must feel very empowering to construct those sentences. Lindy effect is ticking on all of it and humanity. Despite those accomplishments, we’re not going to break physics; humanity will cease to exist.
We’ve burned up a lot of our own runway via resource consumption on consumer shovelgear/wear. Put the toxic positivity spin on it all you want, there is no moat when we use up Earth diddling our good feels, changing nothing but the speed at which we exhaust ourselves.
Fingers crossed the decline in obligation to preserve religious memes breaks us free from social stagnation and normalization (though the olds are trying to perpetuate through economic memes) and allow us to live organically, devalue things we get bored with, as our brains seem to do organically:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen...
Trends in such a direction:
https://www.deseret.com/23583331/teens-smartphones
https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2023/02/21/teens-no...
Industrial controls that stabilize logistics are one kind of technology. Online thought policing via social media and the gadgets that provide it are huge wastes. Titillating to the olds, but banal and normalized to the kids.
* Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Black Mirror’s take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back