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Basil Toil
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Registrato: 2022-08-15
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At its best, technology provides conveniently available applications for improving our memory. Recent photographic advances in our Apple and Android phones make possible photographs of breathtaking verisimilitude. But substituting technological memory for human biological memory comes at a cost.Look around on your next vacation and you’ll easily identify people snapping pictures at a frenzied pace. Their memories for the vacation sites will be largely limited to those pictures since little time is usually taken to really look at the subjects the camera is focused on. As a result, the pictures will not serve as prompts to personal memory, but replacements for it.While technology can both amplify and enrich those experiences that will form the basis for our memory, it can also cause our powers of memory to atrophy. Why bother to focus, concentrate, and apply effort to visualize something when a cellphone camera can do all the work for you?One of the ways to avoid all this is to use photographs as memory boosters to show things that you failed to perceive when you took the picture. Since it is unlikely that you will remember all of the details of your ex-college roommate’s wedding dress, it’s alright, for instance, to take a picture that can serve as a memory enhancer and corrector.Current and upcoming advances in technology are already scrambling our concepts of past, present, and future. Imagine yourself watching a performance by your favorite female vocalist. You are enjoying it but for some reason you are feeling creeped out. The publicity surrounding the performance describes it as “live,” but how can it be live if that vocalist has been dead for nine years?Until recently, it was hard to argue about the finality (at least on this earth) of death. When someone died, they became a permanent denizen of the past. But now, thanks to virtual technology, we can experience a dead person in the present as if they were still alive.In the fall of 2021, Whitney Houston, a multiple Grammy Award–winning singer, put on a sold-out performance in Las Vegas. Although the accompanying musicians and dancers were indisputably alive, “Whitney Houston” consisted of a computer-generated face of Houston at the height of her career digitally fused to an actress body-double. This high-tech afterlife performance included “Whitney” pacing the stage, calling out to her fans, and dancing so convincingly that she comes across as a real-life performer in the right now rather than someone who has been dead for almost a decade.So how will this high-tech performance be remembered? Certainly not as something that “really happened.” Rather, Houston’s afterlife performance will be easily assimilated into the rapidly evolving metaverse: an alternative virtual world. And the closer the approximations of something like Whitney Houston’s metaverse appearance to a live event, the harder it will be to distinguish in memory between what happened in “real life” and something occurring in the virtual world. What exactly was seen and heard?A technological transformation of a dead person into a vivid seemingly alive recreation on the screen? A recreation believable enough to arouse uncomfortable inner experiences compatible with what computer and Artificial Intelligence experts refer to as the “uncanny valley”: feelings of weirdness, strangeness, or unease in response to a virtual person taking on an almost exact resemblance to a real person?

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