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Notes -
We had a death in the family recently. It will be a simple funeral - a viewing, a cremation, and a burial of her ashes. I chuckled a bit when the funeral home asked us for a DVD for the photo slideshow during the ceremony. It got me thinking - how is AI technology and AR/VR going to change the future of the funeral industry?
Imagine that an AI avatar was trained on voice recordings, videos, photos, and text of the deceased. You visit the cemetery with your family and you all don the VR goggles, stepping into the living room of grandma's house. She's tending to the garden and her avatar ad-libs about her tomatoes and the recent weather. Just as you remembered from a few years ago before she had to go into the nursing home.
If you've seen the incredible improvements in image and video generation in the last 2-3 years, as well as the improvements in text-to-speech (see a previous Friday Fun thread post that I shared) you'll probably agree with me that this is something we'll see in our lifetime. Yes, we'll have a period of uncanny valley, but when it's fully ironed out, there will be a convincing digital copy of ourselves floating in the ether.
Everyone spends some time chatting with grandma then she excuses herself to take the cookies out of the oven. You decide it's about time to grab lunch with the family and say goodbye for now.
The funeral home charges you for the disposable insert in the VR goggles that soaks up your tears.
If it was just a brief little loop of one specific memory, like the photos in Harry Potter, then I guess that would be OK. But it's not going to stay there, is it? It will develop persistent memory and learn over time, so it's basically an afterlife. And every single member of the family will want their own version, so now there's 10 copies of grandmas that have all evolved over time. that sounds horrible.
I fail to see what's so horrible about it. It's a pale shadow of true immortality, but it's better than nothing, and I don't see how ten copies is any worse than one. You could always get them to sync up, and if you can't, then a granny who has a different set of memories and doesn't remember what you said to her last week is not much different from a living one with dementia.
Wouldn't it be great if your kids could see a healthier, better version of grandma? No reason to wait until she's dead, just turn on AI grandma and avoid an awkward trip to the nursing home.
If she's lucky, maybe someone will remember to turn on grandma's "your family cares about you and comes to visit regularly" VR experience.
I think the future is going to be far more awful and dehumanizing than we can possibly imagine right now.
Certainly, that's why I'm a transhumanist and a doctor.
I presume you don't see yourself doing this, and neither do I (assuming my grandmas were anything but ash now). So most decent people who visit because of obligation or simply because they care will continue doing so. The people who had little inclination to do so won't, and I don't see this making much of a change on the margin.
So far, improvements in telepresence and telecommunications means it's easier for lonely old folk to speak to their families, leaving aside their issues operating a phone or a video app. The alternative wouldn't be a drastic increase in visits, it would be them being left even more in the cold than is already the case.
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