If you last saw a friend 15 years ago, it feels like you have a vivid, solid grasp on who you were.

you they. whoops.

The trick is to have a conversation with someone else who knew them. If they are dead and you can't go look them up on Facebook and learn that they now sell essential oils and/or crypto.

...in the second version the healthy version starts to blend with the sick and diminishing version.

Funerals are nice in that way if you've been watching someone slowly die over weeks or months. You get together with a lot of people who knew the deceased before they were dying and you remember more from before.

Oh no, I'm even more sorry about your cousin.

4 would have been better if I'd beat 3 to posting.

Thanks, but I was thinking of my parents. I had not watched my cousin die and she died unexpectedly and quickly.

They're selling crypto and essential oils?

Also I hadn't realized that essential oils were the feminine form of crypto, but I see now that it's obviously so.

Anyway, deadbots is creepy and will presumably be used in inheritance scams starting in 2027.

"Hi honey, I need my money back."

"Deadbots." sheesh, AIdolons was right there.

I can't imagine the experience being anything other than profoundly saddening, but I guess everybody's built differently.

This was a recurring bit on the Max Headroom tv show. IIRC there was one old widow who couldn't afford the whole package so she just got a hologram of her late husband going "hahaha, that's wonderful"

I love the idea of visiting with some of my loved ones that I miss.

I can't think of much that would be more depressing. I have fond memories of all my grandparents, and I still miss them, but if someone presented me with a chatbot designed to emulate my grandfather I would burn it. And the same goes for those various friends of my own age who have died. A truly horrifying, macabre concept.

I suspect the dividing line here is that apo and I have read "Pet Semetary" and heebie hasn't.

I saw the South Park episode with Butters that parodies Pet Semetary.

I'm pretty sure I read Pet Cemetery! I have more vivid memories of Christine, Carrie, and the Bachmann stories though.

It does sound horrible and depressing, but I can imagine being so desperate to see someone again that this would be attractive.

It does sound horrible and depressing, but I can imagine being so desperate to see someone again that this would be attractive.

Anyway, I meant visiting again with their actual alive selves, in the magical thinking sense.

The OP is excellent.

I can't imagine the experience being anything other than profoundly saddening, but I guess everybody's built differently.

For example, Laurie Anderson -- https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/28/laurie-anderson-ai-chatbot-lou-reed-ill-be-your-mirror-exhibition-adelaide-festival

"I mean, I really do not think I'm talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him - I really don't. But people have styles, and they can be replicated."

The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. "Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, 'Oh?'. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that's a pretty good ratio for writing, I think."

She was great in WKRP.

All of you need to watch FISK. There's an episode where before he died, the deceased had set up a service that sends his widow texts supposedly from him. She thinks this is creepy and wants it to stop, hilarity sort of ensues.

When I saw John Wick, I got confused and through that his dead wife sent him the puppy from beyond the grave as opposed to arranging for it before she died.

My way explained the whole thing where he killed like 200 people better.

+ Spoiler Alert

My neighbours had a dog which their son bought for them just before he died of cancer and then two years later their other neighbour poisoned it.

wow, that's awful.

Yeah. If someone poisoned Crom I honestly think I might try to beat them to death with a hammer. And Crom wasn't a dying gift from a beloved child, we just bought her from someone who bred dogs.

To other dogs?

Anyone seen Upload? It's basically a whole series about this. Mostly a dark comedy.

I think my wife watched that.

30: I linked a picture of the Upload spoof of Charlie Munger's architectural ideas awhile back.

I think that series is running out of ideas. Season 3 repeated what I regard as the error of The Matrix: Spending too much time in the boring real world.

Do dead bot dads dream of electric dad bods?

I forget the exact functionality in the product in The Startup Wife but it was something like this. Can definitely recommend for a relatively humorous mostly light read. (But for the life of me cannot recall the ending*.)

While in book recommend mode, just finished Martyr! and it is quite a read. About 3/4 of the way in was thinking it was about the brst recent fiction I had read in years. That assessment tailed off towards the end* but definitely recommend.

*Maybe it's an age thing but am finding endings suck more and more. Hardest thing to get right in literature. Makes sense of course as the constellation of possibilities for the story arc collapse into the grubby little pebble of what actu got produced.

Surely the major application is the other way around: bots for the elderly to talk to the children who aren't available.

Or, increasingly, the children that never existed.

Or, a bot that will call your mom for you every day to make you feel less guilty.

My dad went full on Fox News Geezer in his later years. I'll be damned if I'd want to be haunted by that any further!

35: William Gibson, "Virtual Light", has interactive dolls made to resemble infants, for the benefit of grandparents who live too far away to visit the actual grandchild. There's a thriving second hand market, but the highest prices attach to mint-in-box dolls, which were ordered but never delivered because the original infant died.

Fisk is fun. Thanks Thorn!

38: there's a tweet making the rounds to the effect of "Tim Walz is the dad millennials yearned for, when their dads got brainwashed by Fox News."

There's very little information in the article as to take up - and the only data point quoted seem to indicate it's fairly low (100 customers for a digital avatar on a headstone).

So the article's framing of it as a social trend seems to be a little off - after all there are companies elsewhere doing similar things: https://eternos.life/ covered on NBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJv8pcbXKw

But then I wouldn't expect an 'and finally' news piece to give me any particular insight apart from a look at the psychology of people starting these companies.

I guess one advantage of growing up bookish and lonely is that a lot of the people you end up feeling closest to are dead already.

Not all lonely and bookish people stab those they are close to.

Some of them stab complete strangers.

This victim is too familiar. This victim is too random. But *this* victim is just right.

OT: This Steph Curry guy is pretty good.

I see someone made him a shirt that says "NUIT NUIT"

||

I just learned that there was a professional golfer who married an airline stewardess, and both died in a plane crash on a golf course.
|>

48: And now there's a golf course in the Bay Area named after him. Seems like tempting fate

50 to 49

Well it was either that or an airport

You can tell the difference by whether or not they let you drive the little electric cars yourself.

Harris was repeatedly interrupted by protesters who were chanting "Kamala Kamala, you can't hide, we won't vote for genocide". She initially responded with: "I'm here because we believe in democracy. Everyone's voice matters." But she subsequently told them: "You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I'm speaking." The vast majority of the crowd cheered her on.

"Jen O'Side" is still available as a pseud.

I've lost track of what was the last 'nym I used here, so let's get back to basics.

I think this is a presentiment of everything that makes "transhumanism" more like a horror trope than an aspirational goal. If someone could actually capture your "essence" digitally, the fact of the matter would be that all of that data is still in the hands of some asshole tech bro who could manipulate it however they wanted, and the likely result would be grotesque mediocrity: your loved ones trying to talk to "echoes" of you that don't actually resemble you, and then those echoes being embedded in constructs that also don't resemble you.

"Deadbots" are the early part of that process. It's such an obviously stupid and creepy idea that of course the tech bros love it. These are people to whom SkyNet would be a rad "disruption" and not a cautionary tale. And really. Fuck these people. Fuck their projects, their empty objectives, their hyped up non-thoughts.

Speaking of deadbots...where have you been?

56 sounds like you would enjoy the short story "Lena" about a very similar process.https://qntm.org/lena

I"t's such an obviously stupid and creepy idea that of course the tech bros love it."

The only tech bro in the article is the Microsoft executive who says "we have no plans to do anything like this because it's really disturbing".

An nteresting angle is that this is happening in China, a society which as the article notes is deeply screwed up about death (and has been for a while, see Taoist obsession with immortality). And also has a different view of expedient deceit - I was very struck by the guy who wants a deadbot of his uncle so he can continue lying to his granny about her son being alive.

58: Enjoy seems unlikely, terrific story though it is.

"These are people to whom SkyNet would be a rad "disruption" and not a cautionary tale."
Musk just argued in his "interview" with Trump that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt so it wasn't really that bad right?

Dr. Slackie!!

61: yes. "Appreciate".