At some point in the future, we might be able to apply machine learning to analyze the corpus of all of the extant letters or emails written by an individual during their lifetime, to create a sort of imitative avatar. This could give us the capability to (more or less) “converse” with someone long dead.<\/p>\n
I don’t claim (or believe) that we could thereby have a substantive conversation with the former Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, and certainly not receive any original thoughts from those great minds. Yet we might be able to have the sense<\/i> of what such a conversation would be like, if only on the level of idle chat.<\/p>\n
I wonder just how far such a technology could take us in the limit. Suppose we were to extrapolate Moore’s Law way out into the future, positing a computational technology a billion times more powerful than current levels. How long could we comfortably chat with a virtual virtual Virginia Woolf or Sir Andrew Johnson, before the seams in the illusion begin to show?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At some point in the future, we might be able to apply machine learning to analyze the corpus of all of the extant letters or emails written by an individual during their lifetime, to create a sort of imitative avatar. This could give us the capability to (more or less) “converse” with someone long dead. … Continue reading “Future conversations with past minds”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18884"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18885,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18884\/revisions\/18885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}