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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Most people seem to hate the idea of AI versions of dead celebrities, but I can’t help but be a bit intrigued. I’m a fan of golden-age Hollywood movies from the 1930s to 1950s. Most of that era’s stars are dead now, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before we see some of their likeness in ‘new’ versions of old movies. Some people may not like it, but where there are dollars to be made, things tend to happen.

    What would ‘Casablanca’ be like with Spencer Tracy instead of Humphrey Bogart? ‘Gone with the Wind’ with Vivien Leigh swapped out for Bette Davis. Orson Welles always said his masterpiece would have been ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’, not ‘Citizen Kane’, if the former hadn’t been destroyed by the studio in editing. Maybe his vision of it can be resurrected by AI versions of the actors recreating scenes from the original script.











  • Some people’s reaction to this proposal might be to wonder why bother? We already have a functional agriculture system using sunlight that’s been working for several thousand years. But there is a lot to be said for improving on it.

    This approach could grow many foods where they can’t currently be grown.  Thus we could localize food production, and decentralize it. This could vastly reduce the waste of food transport.  Furthermore, pollution from pesticides could be vastly reduced.  It also allows us to think about rewilding huge swathes of our environments. Finally, this is an approach amenable to full automation.  Ultimately that will reduce the price of food and its availability. Who knows, several decades from now, the standard way to produce food may be via indoor methods tended to by robot farmers.