Another ‘AI’ Caper: Artificial Resurrection

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“I’m baaaaaack…!”

So… your beloved wife/husband/grandma/whoever has died and you are grieving, it’s a loss that really hurts.

Artificial Intelligence to the rescue!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2416079-resurrecting-loved-ones-as-ai-ghosts-could-harm-your-mental-health/

See, they will re-create your loved one digitally–“digital” is always best!–from his or her surviving emails, tweets, blog posts, etc. You die, sure–but you are reborn as the sum total of your tweets!

A critic out there says this is not A-OK for someone’s mental health. He says it makes the recipient unable to move on from a posture of grief; or it could be worse. Maybe it can even birth and sustain a full-blown delusion.

He’s also afraid it might give rise to “a new religion.” (“Ain’t we got enough o’ those in New Yawk?”)

Hot dog. When they’re not erasing white people from history, AI lets you see and talk to dead people.

So Who Needs Real Reality?

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“Wow! Here in the metaverse we can fly–just like Peter Pan!”

Reports are floating around that Facebook plans to “rebrand” its parent company–change the name, that is–and you’ll never guess why, so I’ll tell you.

It’s “to move beyond social media into the metaverse, described as a virtual world achieved through virtual reality” (https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/facebook-plans-to-change-name-report-says-social-media-reacts).

What the dickens is the “metaverse”?

Oh, well! It’s “a multiverse which interoperates (?) with the real world, incorporating things like augmented reality overlays (?), VR dressing rooms for real stores, and even apps like Google maps.” Glad I cleared that up for you!

But what’s a multiverse? It’s “a hypothetical group of multiple universes.”

Excuse me, my BS detector is going off.

Everything here is man-made. It is not real. It is not reality. We used to call people “crazy” who spent a lot of their time in unreality. Now we call them “Mark Zuckerberg.” “Hypothetical” means we sort of think it might be real. Maybe.

How badly do we need this schiff? Honk if you’ve just gotta have it.

We’re gonna need a bigger loony bin.

 

We’re Driving Our Dogs Crazy, Too

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After a year of Mandates and restrictions and fear porn on the nightly nooze, a lot of people have grown a bit paranoid. They get all kinds of weird if they see someone without a mask, and shy away from… well, everybody. Must preserve Social Distancing, you know. And can we double up on those face masks?

Well, guess what! Having made ourselves crazy, now we’re working on our dogs. See the article on Dr. Becker’s veterinary site, https://healthypets.mercola.com/sites/healthypets/archive/2021/03/14/canine-fear-and-anxiety.aspx?ui=a26451ca60f77065e240c7fb026545a41b6fb38badaf00b35456684a9778d9bd&sd=20080201&cid_source=petsnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20210314Z1&mid=DM823320&rid=1106568324 .

No joke: researchers report “canine fears and anxiety” have built up to a record high, here in America and probably elsewhere, too. Its most common expression is “noise sensitivity,” but “fearfulness toward humans” is high on the list.

Well… duh! Facial expressions are very important to dogs. Dogs read humans’ facial expressions. Now everybody’s wearing a mask.  Dogs are in tune with their owners: our uneasiness, our fearfulness, rubs off on them. If you’re habitually nervous, your dog will be, too. Happy people have happy dogs. Miserable people have miserable dogs.

And there’s also other stuff we do, apart from King COVID’s rule, to mess up our dogs’ minds.

We overbreed them like crazy. Everybody’s gotta have a pedigreed dog. Nobody wants just a dog dog anymore. Overbreeding leads to inborn neurotic behavior in dogs.

And then there’s that fad for keeping the poor dog penned up in a crate every day for hours at a time. If you don’t think that would contribute to an overall affliction of canine fearfulness, you’re just not thinking. But people do that because it’s convenient for them, not the dog.

And all of this, every jot and tittle of it, has been brought to you by Government Science and The Smartest People In The World.