Depending on how it's implemented, it might very well be one of the non-creepy uses. As long as it isn't taken to extremes, being able to have a chance to say goodbye to your loved one could be therapeutic. Or to see them once a year during the Ghost Festival to help keep their memory alive.
It does have high creepy potential (all deepfakes do), but I can understand the appeal. Make sure you take some nice videos of the people you love, and let them take some of you. Death doesn't always come with a warning, and you don't want to be wishing you had some recordings.
This isn’t new. Check out Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley. It’s a nice primer. Most of our internet tech was built for the military or funded by the military for military ideas (no matter what MIT or Berkeley theoreticians might try to convince you of).
No way in hell would I do that if I had that kind of knowledge. Look what happened to Snowden for doing something like that.
He would still spend the remainder of his life in federal prison or be executed if he ever steps back on US soil or the soil of someone with an extradition treaty that is looking to get some brownie points.
That wouldn't happen to all of them, but I bet you there are some working on some classified mess that would be found and made an example of in short order to shut the others up.
In 2017, I played a part in the successful #CancelMaven campaign that got Google to end its participation in Project Maven, a contract with the US Department of Defense to equip US military drones with artificial intelligence.
Today a similar movement, organized under the banner of the coalition No Tech for Apartheid, is targeting Project Nimbus, a joint contract between Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing infrastructure and AI capabilities to the Israeli government and military.
If a strategically placed insider released information not otherwise known to the public about the Nimbus project, it could really increase the pressure on management to rethink its decision to get into bed with a military that’s currently overseeing mass killings of women and children.
It certainly wasn’t a spontaneous response to an op-ed, and I don’t presume to advise anyone currently at Google (or Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, Anduril, or any of the growing list of companies peddling AI to militaries) to follow my example.
Back then, the company responded to our actions by defending the nature of the contract, insisting that its Project Maven work was strictly for reconnaissance and not for weapons targeting—conceding implicitly that helping to target drone strikes would be a bad thing.
Today it maintains that the work it is doing as part of Project Nimbus “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” At the same time, it asserts that there is no room for politics at the workplace and has fired those demanding transparency and accountability.
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I wonder how long it will be before we see people purposely create these so they can influence their descendants. There might be a future where people have "relationships" with a collection of long dead people.
AIs controlling money is the application that scares me the most, honestly, not weapons. It's flexible and attached to every section of life by design; there is no such thing as sandboxing.
In science fiction, they were envisioned as a fundamental part of the future—even in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, where the main character, Winston Smith, sits in a room peppered with pneumatic tubes that spit out orders for him to alter previously published news stories and historical records to fit the ruling party’s changing narrative.
“The pneumatic tube system of communication is, of course, in use in many of the downtown stores, in newspaper offices […] but there exists a great deal of ignorance about the use of compressed air, even among engineering experts.”
Electrical rail won out over compressed air, paper records and files disappeared in the wake of digitization, and tubes at bank drive-throughs started being replaced by ATMs, while only a fraction of pharmacies used them for their own such services.
It just makes too much sense to not do it,” says Cory Kwarta, CEO of Swisslog Healthcare, a corporation that—under its TransLogic company—has provided pneumatic tube systems in health-care facilities for over 50 years.
As computers and credit cards started to become more prevalent in the 1980s, reducing paperwork significantly, the systems shifted to mostly carrying lab specimens, pharmaceuticals, and blood products.
Steven Fox, who leads the electrical engineering team for the pneumatic tubes at Michigan Medicine, describes the scale of the materials his system moves in terms of African elephants, which weigh about six tons.
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When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.
There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.
If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.
It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.
Synthetic embryos are clones, too—of the starting cells you grow them from. But they’re made without the need for eggs and can be created in far larger numbers—in theory, by the tens of thousands. And that’s what could revolutionize cattle breeding. Imagine that each year’s calves were all copies of the most muscled steer in the world, perfectly designed to turn grass into steak.
“I would love to see this become cloning 2.0,” says Carlos Pinzón-Arteaga, the veterinarian who spearheaded the laboratory work in Texas.
The article said it was not just for cattle, more for general science research.
It's noble how many of you are willing to get philosophical about the rise of deep fakes freeing us from puritan beliefs and readdressing the concept of truth.
While completely fucking ignoring the harassment and extortion of deep fakes. Y'all want to get high minded about YOUR right to free speach using OTHER peoples bodies as a gateway to some utopia, while playing dumb that this is just another form of mysgonstic abuse. If it truly is just you something you are doing in the privacy of your own home, why the fuck do you need other people's media?
Your ideals are built upon YET AGAIN women taking one for the team. The "truth" is immposible to know so YOLO, let's turn any women who made the mistake of being photographed in to porn. Her consent doesn't matter between the privacy of me and my dataset, even if I do upload it and blackmail her a lil'.
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