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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.
I disagree that it's better than nothing. Such a "copy" wouldn't be the person you love, it would be a simulacrum pretending to be them. Even if it's many times more convincing than what we could do now, it would still be nothing more than a doll. The original, the being with actual value, is lost forever. If I can't have my loved one back, I wouldn't want to piss on their memory by pretending that a cheap imitation is a reasonable substitute for having them around.
If that's how you see things, then you have the option of not creating such a simulacrum, and asking your family not to make one of you. If you're an EU citizen, you probably have stronger legal recourse, such as the people who successfully got ChatGPT to ignore their names.
I would be entirely fine with such a clone of me being around when I wasn't. I don't see it being any worse than people fondly looking back at pictures or videos of the deceased today, they're gone either way, and they're instantiating a replica in their brain to represent them.
Sure. But the fact that I may have legal recourse does not make the idea not horrifying. I was explaining to you why I find it horrifying, not saying that there's nothing to be done.
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