What could you do with a realistic digital version of you?
I found an interesting article titled “Fake videos are on the rise. As they become more realistic, seeing shouldn’t always be believing” and I want to comment on it.
It focuses on the dangers permitted by having computer-generated video that shows people doing things they cannot do. However, Hollywood brought that decades ago, the difference is that soon anyone could do it, even machines.
So the question is the always the same: what if that technology falls in the wrong hands? And the answer, always the same, is: Education.
There could be a lot of discussion over the previous question and answer but I want to explore some, to my eyes, good cases for having a realistic digital version of me.
I could put myself to fly over cities or replace the main character of a movie with myself and create stories for my niece in which I play an starring role. At the end, what I think is that we will be able just to share our imagination easily. And for me, that’s a huge tool for humanity.
Nature is very cyclical so we are cyclical by nature. In the past the amount of people being able to read was very small and the amount of people being able to write even more so. I don’t have any proofs but the thought of having everyone being able to read and write scared a few people, motivated some others and didn’t even cross the mind of the rest.
It’s very hard for me to provide you with scientific material to prove that increments in information production and consumption leads to increments in life quality. I am an empirical believer of it because all the information revolutions create new roles for people, from the writer to the data scientist to all its derivatives: one writer => many readers; one data scientist =>many users. [Seeing the relation between write/readers is easier than seeing data scientist/users]
Even after it’s very easy for anyone to produce information now in the form of text, image or video, (and the name for AR and VR content), this amount of information is still limited by the number of producers: us, humans. So the natural flow is to have more things producing more information and putting them on a distribution channel, let’s say the Internet.
And what if those things know a lot about humans in general and a lot about you too. They also know that you love video and that you know you have to exercise and you are not doing it. What if they know that people who want to exercise image themselves in their sportswear running down a street. So the next time you open YouTube first thing in the morning you see a self-started video of you on your sportswear running down your street to get you motivated. Will that catch your attention? Will that motivate you?
What if you see a short video of how maintaining your smoking habits will make you look/feel in 10 years compared to the version of you that stops smoking? what if it was easier to start with the end in mind? How can these tools help us to be more creative, have healthier habits, increase our life quality?
I’m excited about the benefits of having machines generating content for us.
