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Immortality Through Deep Fakes
Have you heard of “deep fakes?” These are audio/visual creations of people and situations that use sampling techniques combined with artificial intelligence to manufacture events or statements that never happened. Prominent persons with a lot of online video, audio, and written material are particularly vulnerable to fakes because there is so much data from which to construct, with AI, a virtual event that looks and sounds like it really happened.
My thought went to AI this morning because in a few weeks, we will be interring Mrs Rodin’s mother at a cemetery in California. Her resting place will be next to a plot where Mrs Rodin’s brother and sister-in-law will rest. Her sister-in-law is very much alive, but her brother died 20 years ago at the age of 46. Ever since, my sister-in-law has kept his cremains with her.
Just a couple of years ago when an aunt died and my sister-in-law’s family was looking for plots, they realized that they had to act, now, to assure that family members of multiple generations could be at rest together. Mrs Rodin’s sister-in-law acquired plots for herself and her dead husband for future interment. And so it was that Mrs Rodin’s mother acquired a plot where she could rest at some future date next to her son. We are taking the occasion of Mrs Rodin’s mother’s interment to inter her son as well, some 20 years after his death.
Mrs Rodin’s sister-in-law, like us, are considering headstones. She and her husband are/were friends of a prominent artist who designed a potential headstone that reflects some of the interests and personality of Mrs Rodin’s brother. It incorporates his love of science fiction — particularly Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the design, there is space for one or more inscriptions. I suggested some quotes from Clarke that my brother-in-law might have enjoyed. My sister-in-law responded that she wondered what her husband would like someone to be reading in 100 years? I came back with: “How about ‘If you are reading this in 100 years, pass on my greetings to our Artificial Intelligence overlords?'”
And that is what leads me to this post. The Deep Fake phenomena/technique enables us to encode information about a person — images, voice, writing — that gives them a form of existence that can theoretically interact with future humans in a virtual form. Of course, only until the energy runs out. But still.
My brother-in-law did not live long enough to be a real candidate for a Deep Fake. And, truth be told, few in my generation have a rich enough digital trail for a Deep Fake. But the Instagram/Facebook generation is creating digital deposits rich for mining. And so they may yet achieve Deep Fake immortality.
I think my brother-in-law would have enjoyed the commentary that follows this post. And he might have enjoyed a Deep Fake existence — but only if our virtual selves are truly reincarnations and not slick digital tricks.
Published in General
I just happened to watch bits of Eric Weinstein and Jordan Peterson each interviewed about ChatGPT and how it will advance. Peterson was more specific and he said that in 2023 ChatGPT in its next generations (and likely all AI programs) will be exposed to the entire internet and will be able to create in seconds moving images of real or artificial people which speak and make sense and we won’t be able to tell them apart.
And I say, if Chat GPT will get so good, perhaps it will make a determination as to whether AGW is real and disastrous. In which case it might be able to tell us what Biden’s been doing since 2012, and — okay, I know, fat chance — who will be declared the winner in 2024.
Peterson also said that ChatGPT also has written for querying programmers code that works.
Weinstein has a more materialistic view and acknowledges that AI might achieve “consciousness” but that we may never know it when it happens, and what then if the AI desires to manipulate everyone? And he said that preemptively programmers should code AI so that they can’t “metamorphose” but he didn’t say how that may be done.
Here are the short videos if you’re interested.
All we can definitively know is that we are in for a surprise. Even when one’s prediction becomes “true“ there are always surprise elements.
Replika – the AI system developed from a desire to resurrect a boy friend…
Dangerous, creepy or harmless entertainment?
Thank you for your service.
I knew one man a bit older than me who was somewhere in the US Army Georgia or the Carolinas for training so his unit could be transported to Cuba, should the Missile Crisis in 1962 require such troop involvement.
As far as your final statement, in Dem-run states, many Americans did find out that in a flash, they no longer could go where they wanted to go, do as they wanted to do, or keep open their businesses on account of the COVID-Control-The-Population restrictions.
As a result of the over control, suicides were in some areas of the country and in some occupations reported at three times the numbers of fatalities from COVID.
I know a lot of people found out how far we have gone down this path of expected compliance. I think the threat we face today from our own government is the gravest of my lifetime.
As a matter of fact, I was in a unit of the Strategic Army Corps from Fort Bragg, NC and we were on high alert, actually loaded up on aircraft several times during that two week period in October 1962, ready to go to Cuba in support of the 82nd Airborne.
Today’s domestic threat is worse.
Today’s threat is worse. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a child, I was concerned because I noticed those adults around me were upset about it.
When me were stationed in West Germany, the military would let us go to West Berlin on its ” troop train.” We went on “flag orders.” Military security went with the train and did all the contact with East German forces. We were free to go into East Berlin but had to follow certain protocols. My group was treated to a tour of the Berlin Air Safety Center. People who flew to West Berlin had no clue what was needed to keep their plane from being shot down.
I have been through Checkpoints Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. I have seen things. We are on a
dangerous path. And yes, the military used our Social Security number as our ID number until after I retired. I blacked it out in the photo but my paperwork indicates that at some point the military security on the train had to get it stamped by the commies. Sometimes I wonder just how much the Russians have on me. They have pictures from security cameras on the East Berlin streets. I am sure the restaurant where we ate was bugged. Their Russian trawlers did a lot of fishing in the Caribbean underneath our airspace (so they could record our air combat training. I don’t want to live in an oppressive surveillance state. It is quite unsettling to know you are under surveillance.
This is a big deal. I spent my working career on operational matters related to banking focused on converting an overwhelming paper deluge to electronic form, frequently referred to as “checkless” and incorporating electronic direct deposit. Nothing in that work suggested a need for a “cashless” approach and over the half-century since our banking system has been destroyed in that all semblance of privacy between depositors and the banks has been eliminated by government intrusion and oversight. Digital banking efforts underway will be a capstone for government surveillance.
I have read that The Great Reset is behind that. I no longer use the big banks for anything more than an ATM service for traveling. I go local now. They know me when I walk in. I want Republican governors to address the ESG score madness.
I know for an absolute fact that the Chinese have my security file. And, yes, we have moved our money to local banks, too. If you can’t use cash, you will be controlled.
And local banks don’t resemble what they were fifty years ago. They operate under significant intimidation rather than independence.