How to see the dead | Hacker News Reader

How to see the dead

asimov.press

97 pointsmailyk12 comments

Of course, by materializing her memories, they are re-establishing or strengthening the neural pathways that would otherwise wither away with time. It's not necessarily grief-dependent memories when she "revisits" her loved ones but over time, the illusion becomes a weird trap that she would grow more aware of, creating an uncanny valley-like situation.

So not necessarily a "hell" but more like unneeded and distracting kitsch cluttering the shelves; turning your memories into cheap trinkets.

The pendulum swings and she no longer wants to revisit and so she see the doctor again to have the implants altered once more.

Or.

She is forever haunted and trapped by her revisits that she loses sense of reality.

I really like the hyperlinks to real research. Makes this feel closer to hard sci-fi.

Of course, these days you just need a mixed reality face bucket like the Apple Vision Pro to do essentially the same thing

It would help if you spend significant daily time looking at them through such devices while they are still alive, in the sense that it certainly would make it easier to trick your brain into thinking that nothing changed, that they are still around.

I can't look at Vision Pro Immersive Video I shot of my former beloved (now deceased) cat. It's too painful.

that was addressed

> Aux was excited about the project. He’d done his Master’s thesis on AI recreations of loved ones when that was just taking off. He was disappointed that the enthusiasm that followed their first-gen rollouts faded pretty quickly. His take was that one of the problems with their designs was that they’d actually been overfitted to physical reality, rather than people’s emotional one. “People don’t want to see their loved ones as they actually were; they want to see them as they prefer to remember them. There’s a surprisingly high delta between those two things,” he said.

> The illusion that these digital ghosts were workable replacements for their loved ones quickly evaporated. By the early 2030s, they’d been demoted to another type of deepfake, rather than a compelling memorial.

I thought this was real at first.

Me too. It took me few paragraphs at least. The speed of progress is such and the description of the technology obfuscated enough that I honestly thought: ”Wait, what? We can do what now?”

Thanks for saying this, I thought it was real. I didn't read the whole thing and didn't see the Fiction tag haha. I thought "Wow, this guy is extremely close to the Blade Runner guy that does eyes. I guess the future is already here more than I thought."

https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Hannibal_Chew

>Batty: Yes!

>[smiles]

>Batty: Questions... Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?

>Hannibal Chew: Don't know, I don't know such stuff. I just do eyes, ju-, ju-, just eyes... just genetic design, just eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.

>Batty: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!

"Oh, Chew, if only you could see what I have seen... with your eyes."

Upvoted for perfectly on-point Blade Runner quote.

(spoken by a Replicant who toured the universe to the Earth-bound creator of his synthetic eyes.)

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