If you aren’t already paranoid about your entire apartment being able to hear you at all times, this should help. Technology that’s able to take recorded samples of a human’s voice and replicate it in eerie fashion is progressing quickly. In this video from Bloomberg, you can almost see the moment on the host’s face, hearing his A.I.-generated vocal doppelganger, where this goes from a fun segment to a moment of existential horror. Sure, it sounds a little grainy and weird, but I bet it’s more than enough to convince someone, like a bank, that they’re talking to you over a spotty cell connection.
Couple this with how quickly deep-fake technology is moving, and a whole lot of “oh no” starts to percolate in your brainpan. You haven’t truly been gaslit until you’ve been gaslit by your own voice.
Cryonics Upkeep Questions
Cryonics. The source of cool tubes hissing open in sci-fi movies by the hundreds. The idea that a body can be frozen, consciousness intact, for years or centuries, only to be thawed out in the future when new medical advancements have been made. Now, we don’t have any humans successfully off ice, but there are over 250 people at this very moment, frozen in tanks, rock-solid eyeballs looking toward the future. Obviously, we don’t know how this story ends, but we can do a not-totally-fun little thought experiment.
What I wonder is, who’s paying those frozen folks’ tube rent? Who’s covering the electric bills on their personal icebox? I have to imagine a cryopreservation facility isn’t exactly EnergyStar certified, and if you’re getting frozen, it’s probably not for a college gap year, but at least a couple decades. So what happens if you’re not worth keeping cold? After all, if there’s any value to their word, you are still in there somewhere. Do you wake up floating on a personal iceberg made of your bottom half in the ocean somewhere? Or do they do the humane thing and take a sledgehammer to your frosty remains like a big brother working out some issues on his sibling’s snowman?
If something’s pitched as a long-term solution, I’m gonna need some long-term assurances.