Is AI The History Eraser Button?
This iconic scene from the John Krisfaluchi’s Ren and Stimpy television series epitomizes man’s duality. Do we honor nature, protect the earth and everything we love, or impulsively sacrifice ourselves to the false god of progress and the legions of unintended consequences they unleash?
I just published an interview with Metaphysic.ai co-founder and CEO Tom Graham on his company’s Deep Fake Tom Cruise videos, made with Generative AI and so good we can’t tell what’s real anymore.
Consider this. Soon we will be able to train a model of ourselves. It could be photoreal, have your identica voice, and be deeply knowledgeable about our work and personal life. This digital twin, your AI twin, would survive you and become a legacy. It would walk like you, talk like you, think like you. It could meet your ancestors and give them advice, share their values and view of the world. Wow.
very possible in the next ten years I will create an AI enabled avatar that ould survive me as an independent being, albeit trapped in the digital world. It would be a weird kind of immortality, but people who can afford it will do it. MIT Professor Patti Maes talks about how mobile phones have changed our relationship with reality, and each other. We are always available, yet rarely present. Now we are talking about technology changing the nature of reality, how perception and memory, the power to live forever, at least as a sentient AI. Maybe my surviving digital twin will keep learning and experiencing new things with other avatars.
Driven by an AI model you yourself train, your ancestor’s conversation might be uncannily close to what you would actually say were you present. Perhaps you’ll become friends with your fifth generation ancestor, the grandson of your grandson. To people in a simulation with your AI-driven digital twin, will see you and converse with you so realistically they will remember your interchange as real. Now it gets even weirder. Changing people’s memories might help those traumatized by violence and war, but it would also meet the definition of brainwashing.
Training the AI of yourself would allow you to present the best you to history, and remember it as personal history. You can train it with pictures, even old ones like my dad took in 1965. You can make a model of your loved one, or the idealized version, and use their voice to make remake memories. Better memories. What would the wealthy pay, I wonder, if they to give their regrets away. This is sci-fi stuff. But it’s happening.
Make no mistake. Humans are apes with guns, unhindered by unintended consequences. With GenAI making digital twins that look and sound like us, and with AI’s semantic understanding of language, voice recognition, computer vision, this represents the mother of all convergence. We are staring, literally, at the history eraser button right now, telling each other not to touch it while secretly scheming to use it to our advantage.
