based on the ashes of the two presidential candidates, we are also looking at the best chance in recent memory for a vice president to become president
Just think, if some sit home or vote third party like they did in 2000 and 2016, we could hand over at least two more SC seats and our rights and privacy with them.
Letting good be the enemy of perfect is a fool’s errand. And we have an illegal war, a slew of bad rulings, and five lost opportunities on the SC to prove it. So, yeah go vote for Jill, Cornie or Bobby. Just don’t come bitching to me if Trump wins.
I mean, it depends on how many we whack, doesn’t it.
Uh . . that is . . . how many . . . um . . others . . . uhhhhh . . . that is, to say - in a, in a manner of speaking, if y’know . . . ummm. . . . y’know life is a . . a fleeting . . it’s, it’s very . . . so. . . Yeah.
He posted online, telling his friends it was time to say goodbye. Then his friend called him up, saying he had an opportunity at his company Eternos.Life for Bommer to build an interactive AI version of himself.
But in this case it seems like an entirely good thing? The offer was made by an actual friend, the guy himself wanted this, his wife too, and they’re both pretty cognizant about what this is and isn’t.
Yeah contrary to all the negativity about this in this thread, I think there’s a lot of worthwhile reasons for this that aren’t centered on fawning over the loss of a love one. Think of how many family recipes could be preserved. Think of the stories that you can be retold in 10 years. Think of the little things that you’d easily forget as time passes. These are all ways of keeping someone with us without making their death the main focus.
Yes, death and moving on are a part of life, we also always say to keep people alive in our hearts. I think there are plenty of ways to keep people around us alive without having them present, I don’t think an AI version of someone is inherently keeping your spirit from continuing on, nor is it inherently keeping your loved one from living in the moment.
Also I can’t help but think of the Star Trek computer but with this. When I was young I had a close gaming friend who we lost too soon, he was very much an announcer personality. He would have been perfect for being my voice assistant, and would have thought it to be hilarious.
Anyway, I definitely see plenty of downsides, don’t get me wrong. The potential for someone to wallow with this is high. I also think there’s quite a few upsides as mentioned – they aren’t ephemeral, but I think it’s somewhat fair to pick and choose good memories to pass down to remember. Quite a few old philosophical advents coming to fruition with tech these days.
Think of how many family recipes could be preserved. Think of the stories that you can be retold in 10 years. Think of the little things that you’d easily forget as time passes.
An AI isn’t going to magically know these things, because these aren’t AIs based on brain scans preserving the person’s entire mind and memories. They can learn only the data they’re told. And fortunately, there’s a much cheaper way for someone to preserve family recipies and other memories that their loved ones would like to hold onto: they could write it down, or record a video. No AI needed.
We have a box of old recipe cards from my grandmother that my wife cherishes. My parents gifted them to her because out of all their daughter-in-laws, she is the one that loves to cook and explore recipes the most. I just can’t imagine someone wanting something like that in a sterile technological aspect like an “AI-powered” app.
“But Trev, what if you used an LLM to generate summaries-” no, fuck off (he said to the hypothetical techbro in his ear).
I also suspect, based on the accuracy of AIs we have seen so far, that their interpretation of the deceased’s personality would not be very accurate, and would likely hallucinate memories or facts about the person, or make them “say” things they never would have said when they were alive. At best it would be very Uncanny Valley, and at worst would be very, very upsetting for the bereaved person.
I have no doubts about that either, myself. Though even if such an abomination of a doppelganger were to exist, and it seems that these companies are hellbent on making it so, it would be worse for the reasons you described previously: prolonging and molesting the grieving process that human beings have evolved to go through. All in the name of a dollar. I apologize for being so bitter about this (this bitterness is not directed at you, frog), but this entire "AI’ phenomenon fucking disgusts and repulses me so much I want to scream.
I absolutely, 100% agree with you. Nothing I have seen about the development of AI so far has suggested that the vast majority of its uses are grotesque. The few edge cases where it is useful and helpful don’t outweigh the massive harm it’s doing.
This is a very patronizing view of people who all seem to be well informed about what this is and isn’t and who have already acknowledged that they will put it aside if it scares them. No one is foisting this on the bereaved wife and the husband has preemptively said it’s ok if her or her children never use it.
This might fail in all the ways you think it will. That’s a very small dataset of information, so it’s likely to be either be an overcomplicated recording or to need to incorporate training other than what he personally said, but it’s not your place to tell her what’s best for her personal grieving process.
Given the husband is likely going to die in a few weeks, and the wife is likely already grieving for the man she is shortly going to lose, I think that still places both of them into the “vulnerable” category, and the owner of this technology approached them while they were in this vulnerable state. So yes, I have concerns, and the fact that the owner is allegedly a friend of the family (which just means they were the first vulnerable couple he had easy access to, in order to experiment on) doesn’t change the fact that there are valid concerns about the exploitation of grief.
With the way AI techbros have been behaving so far, I’m not willing to give any of them the benefit of the doubt about claims of wanting to help rather than make money - such as using a vulnerable couple to experiment on while making a “proof of concept” that can be used to sell this to other vulnerable people.
Nope, I’m just not giving the benefit of the doubt to the techbro who responded to a dying man’s farewell posts online with “hey, come use my untested AI tool!”
I think it would be the opposite of upsetting, but in an unhealthy way. I think it would snap them out of their grief into a place of strangeness, and theyd stop feeling their feelings.
Yeah, I think you could be right there, actually. My instinct on this from the start is that it would prevent the grieving process from completing properly. There’s a thing called the gestalt cycle of experience where there’s a normal, natural mechanism for a person going through a new experience, whether it’s good and bad, and a lot of unhealthy behaviour patterns stem from a part of that cycle being interrupted - you need to go through the cycle for everything that happens in your life, reaching closure so that you’re ready for the next experience to begin (most basic explanation), and when that doesn’t happen properly, it creates unhealthy patterns that influence everything that happens after that.
Now I suppose, theoretically, there’s a possibility that being able to talk to an AI replication of a loved one might give someone a chance to say things they couldn’t say before the person died, which could aid in gaining closure… but we already have methods for doing that, like talking to a photo of them or to their grave, or writing them a letter, etc. Because the AI still creates the sense of the person still being “there”, it seems more likely to prevent closure - because that concrete ending is blurred.
Also, your username seems really fitting for this conversation. :)
I more meant in the case of someone whose life was cut short and didn’t have the time to put something like this together. I agree that ideally this is information you’d get to pass down, but life doesn’t always work out like that.
Also like you said about the AI powered app, it’s only a matter of time before Adobe Historical Life comes out and we’re paying $90 a month for gramma’s recipes (stories are an additional subscription).
This is a weirdly “you should only do things the natural way” comment section for a Tech-based community.
Humans also weren’t “meant” to be on social media, or recording videos of themselves, or even building shrines or gravesites for their loved ones. They’re just practices that have sprung up as technology and culture change. This very well could be an impediment to her moving on without him, but that’s her choice to make, and all this appeal to tradition is patronizing and doesn’t actually mean tradition is the right path for any given individual. The only right way to process death is:
Burn their body and possessions so that no trace remains
Pump their body full of chemicals so they won’t be decomposing when people ceremonially visit their corpse weeks later
Entomb them with their cats, slaves, and riches
Plant a tree nourished by their decomposing corpse
Turn their ashes into a piece of jewelry to be carried with you always
Make a shrine to the dead in your home to be prayed at regularly
Cast a death mask to more accurately sculpt their bust
Freeze their head so they may be resurrected later
They are burying Ukraine in debt they will never be able to repay and its resources will be gobbled up by various capitalists. THIS was the plan from the start
Not really, initially some countries wanted to make it a gift. After all it comes from Russian assets and Ukraine is being invaded by Russia. Now they changed it so the countries with the worlds largest economies can also profit from the assets they took from Russia.
Having debt is not bad in it self. The UK paid their last WW1 debts back in 2011 or something. I know the UK is in a bad state but it is not because of those war debts.
Oh I see. So the US master plan was to make putin attack Ukraine, give Ukraine loans, ???, putin pulls out of Ukraine, Ukraine now in debt to the US, ???, profit?
putin must be a complete moron to go along with this. Unless you are saying that hes also psrt of the evil capitalist world order?
I get it now! This was in the works for years! Western business interests installed Putin as a sleeper agent in Russia and then forced him to invade Ukraine!
Got it. Clinton interfered with the Russian elections in the 1990s knowing that one day, Putin would become dictator-for-life and invade Ukraine on a spurious pretext in order to create new business interests for Western companies.
Clinton is to blame for the entire Putin ordeal. Had the US not interfered, Yeltsin would have never been reelected and Putin would have never risen to where he is now.
Why start at Clinton? If it hadn’t been for the Vikings, there would be no Russia.
So maybe we should blame the Vikings for Putin invading Ukraine.
Or, and maybe this is going way out on a limb- we blame Putin for doing what he could have just not done and could still stop doing rather than blame a guy who hasn’t been president in a quarter century?
You are trying really hard to not connect the knife sticking in the stab wound with the murder.
I’m pretty sure Yeltsin is the reason Russia has Putin.
Yeltsin oversaw the dissolution of the ussr and brought capitalism to Russia, of course the west wanted him to be president of Russia. All he did was ask Bill for favors on the world stage (and got most of what he asked for).
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western governments froze about $300 billion in Russian assets — including money, securities, gold and bonds — held mainly in banks in Europe.
Leaders of the G7 economies have agreed to use the interest generated by the assets — about $3 billion per year — to help Ukraine.
Ah so ukrains not meant to pay it back but it’s gonna get paid back by the interest on the Russian money held in international banks. Thanks for the explanation and this is definitely a step up of what I thought it was.
This only works assuming Russia is indefinitely sanctioned… So, either we’ve just signed ourselves into a second Cold War, or the taxpayer will be responsible for repayment.
Not sure uninvolved parties (ASEAN, African Union, Arab League, ex-UNASUR) are going to be too keen to store significant foreign reserves in USD/Euro given that the seizing of interest payments is apparently something that’s in the cards.
I guess there’s a reason Saudi Arabia is looking at mBridge… Surely the West can’t be happy with what they’ve been doing in Yemen.
If the war is important, the US and Europe should actually fund it instead of looking for pennies behind couch cushions.
We’re not “trying to make every episode real”. Technology’s direction and human foibles are predictable. Black Mirror writers just aren’t blind and have a good sense of what’s coming down the pipeline.
That’s why it’s called Mirror. It’s about showing us who we are.
Sorry if that’s too horrifying for you, but this goes way beyond imitating the last person to mention these problems.
Absolute bullshit move. If we’re going to help Ukraine, it shouldn’t be by forcing them to take a loan when they’re at their lowest, at their moment of highest need. They should just be given the Russian assets and be called a day.
In case anyone wants to argue we aren’t “forcing them”: if your only options are living amongst the rubble for years and selling your future, you are going to have to sell your future in order to be able to eat today.
France, Germany and the ECB worry about Russian retaliation targeting European assets, and also the potential impact on financial stability and the euro’s status as a reserve currency. There’s concern that depositors from emerging economies may be encouraged to pull money out of western banks, fragmenting the global financial system.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen downplayed such risks in February, arguing that “there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro, yen.” She said that if the G-7 acted together then the group would be representing half of the global economy and all of the currencies that really have the capacity at this point to serve as reserve currencies.
I agree with you, they should just be able to tap the assets directly. Basically some European countries are worried about the effects seizing assets could have on the Euro. Most of these assets are held in Europe as euros. The loan is actually an improvement over the original proposal though. Originally France Germany, etc were pushing only for the 3 billion in interest a year on the assets to be given to Ukraine. The loan solution was pushed by other countries who wanted to give them more cash from the Russian assets as a way to give $50 billion in cash immediately, with those yearly interest payments from Russian assets being used to pay off the loan.
I do believe a loan is a sign of good faith. Like a “we’re here for you. Don’t turn on us later, you owe us. Don’t forget that.” kinda move, geopolitically. It’s not like there exist international debt collectors that act on behalf of nation states.
Like socially, I agree with you. But the global stage isn’t a highschool cafeteria. That “loan” isn’t like a payday loan to a McDonald’s employee trying to buy a car.
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