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Alexa and Google Home will soon let you talk to the dead
- latexr 7y ago> Will the rise of virtual beings be the next step in the human quest for immortality? To the subject, a digital copy others can speak to is about as useful as a statue, i.e. not at all. What’s the point in “questing” for immortality you can’t experience?
- latexr 7y agoBlack Mirror fans may recognise this as the plot of “Be Right Back”[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
- 7402 7y ago'There were similar things in her father's study, four of them, black lacquered cubes arranged along a low shelf of pine. Above each cube hung a formal portrait. The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentleman whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father's evil ancestors, Komiko found them more fascinating than frightening. Her father sometimes meditated before the cubes, kneeling on the bare tatami in an attitude that connoted profound respect. She had seen him in this position many times, but she was ten before she heard him address the cubes. And one had answered. The question had meant nothing to her, the answer less, but the calm tone of the ghost's reply had frozen her where she crouched, behind a door of paper, and her father had laughed to find her there; rather than scold her, he'd explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. "They're not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject."' From Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988] by William Gibson