So I find this both remarkable and somewhat disturbing: [View all]

On YouTube there are multiple sites which use AI to create, not recreate, lectures by the physicist Richard Feynman. One of his fellow physicists, a Nobel Prize winner named Murray Gell-Mann once said, and I’m paraphrasing, that there are many geniuses in physics and mathematics but only a very few magicians and Feynman was one of them.

The lectures are delivered by an AI replica of Feynman, utilizing his voice and speaking in the manner in which he did in his recorded lectures, and discusses topics in much the same way, using examples from the common experience of mankind. They are mesmerizing.

The problem for me is that Feynman passed away in 1988 and the lectures include allusions to experiences past that time. So I began to wonder: how could we possibly conjecture what someone of this brilliance might interpret what for him would be the future? He saw things like few before him and if you read his biography, you realize that this individual existed on a different plane entirely from an intellectual standpoint.

We are creating a false reality: that people will be allowed to live forever since we think we can accurately extrapolate what they might believe and create. This is potentially very dangerous. On the one hand you might take a commentator of great intellect from the past, like Eric Sevareid, and have “him” expound with great profundity upon present issues which many of us would enjoy, or the creation could be steered to adopt principles which would be antithetical to the “real” Sevareid, but would shift public thinking in another direction entirely.

Or, perhaps Trump could live forever this way, a continual generation of images and sound which would bolster his followers for “eternity”. It would be frighteningly easy to do this given the volume of content which has been vomited forth since the 1980’s. Something to think about.