The AI Nightmare No One's Talking About

It was one thing for the hologrammers to go to a famous artist’s estate and ask for permission to create a projection of him for a four-minute performance. It was primitively lifelike, but it was essentially a movie in three dimensions. Here in the present, there’s already chatter that people might want to begin saving voice recordings and videos of their loved ones, compiling their writings and texts, so that after they pass on, these data points can be put into a machine-learning model to create a digital facsimile of the person who has died. An MIT project on “Augmented Eternity and Swappable Identities” is already working on it. At minimum, it could be what Michael Sandel, the influential ethicist and political philosopher at Harvard University, calls a “virtual-immortality chatbot,” with which—with whom?—you could text back and forth. Call it UndeadGPT. You can see wonderful possibilities here. Some might find comfort in hearing their mom’s voice, particularly if she sounds like she really sounded and gives the kind of advice she really gave. But Sandel told me that when he presents the choice to students in his ethics classes, the reaction is split. [View in Browser]( [Esquire]( [SHOP]( EXCLUSIVE [SUBSCRIBE]( [Are We Ready for AI to Raise the Dead?]( [Are We Ready for AI to Raise the Dead?]( It was one thing for the hologrammers to go to a famous artist’s estate and ask for permission to create a projection of him for a four-minute performance. It was primitively lifelike, but it was essentially a movie in three dimensions. Here in the present, there’s already chatter that people might want to begin saving voice recordings and videos of their loved ones, compiling their writings and texts, so that after they pass on, these data points can be put into a machine-learning model to create a digital facsimile of the person who has died. An MIT project on “Augmented Eternity and Swappable Identities” is already working on it. At minimum, it could be what Michael Sandel, the influential ethicist and political philosopher at Harvard University, calls a “virtual-immortality chatbot,” with which—with whom?—you could text back and forth. Call it UndeadGPT. You can see wonderful possibilities here. Some might find comfort in hearing their mom’s voice, particularly if she sounds like she really sounded and gives the kind of advice she really gave. But Sandel told me that when he presents the choice to students in his ethics classes, the reaction is split. [Read More](   [The Wireless Headphones You Never Need to Charge]( [The Wireless Headphones You Never Need to Charge]( This futuristic Adidas pair runs totally on light. 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And lately he’s been hard at work infiltrating the inner sanctum of the Music City establishment, playing Stagecoach and collaborating with artists like Morgan Wallen and Sturgill Simpson. It’s working and, as he says, country music is changing. So is Diplo. Always. While receiving red light therapy, the producer spoke to Esquire about his habit of rule-breaking, recent comments on his sexuality, and a lifetime of being misunderstood. [Read More](   [The 31 Best White Sneakers to Buy Now and Wear All the Damn Time]( [The 31 Best White Sneakers to Buy Now and Wear All the Damn Time]( The style is as timeless—and timely—as ever. [Read More]( [How The Race to Go Viral Killed Digital Media]( [How The Race to Go Viral Killed Digital Media]( Ben Smith, the author of Traffic, opens up about the rise and fall of digital innovators like Gawker and BuzzFeed News. [Read More](     [The Joy of Sex with One Woman (My Wife)]( [The Joy of Sex with One Woman (My Wife)]( We were living in the San Fernando Valley, on one of those endless four-lane roads lined on both sides by tacky apartment buildings. Ours was nicer than most, wood floors and a picture window and a little patch of grass outside shaded by one of those rubber trees with hard dark leaves and those long penile buds that tip pink. It was our first real place and we didn’t have much furniture and one night she lay back on our dining table. I remember the color of the wood and the shape of the dining alcove and the way she looked lying across the table, dark hair flowing across the light wood and all that bare white skin. If you held a gun to my head and asked me to draw an outline of the apartment that showed where the kitchen was, I couldn’t do it. But I remember that table. [Read More](   [One Kettlebell. 20 Minutes. Total Body Burn. 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