Look, I’m nursing my third bourbon of the morning while trying to wrap my head around this one. Some MIT whiz kid decided to host an AI ethics panel with Marie Curie, Lord Voldemort, and that insufferable know-it-all from The Big Bang Theory. Sounds like the setup for a bad joke, right? “A dead scientist, a fictional wizard, and a TV nerd walk into a bar…”
But here’s where it gets interesting, and trust me, you’ll want to be sitting down for this one. They’re using something called “computational biology” to make this fever dream happen. Now, before you roll your eyes and reach for the bottle like I just did, let me break this down.
Turns out computational biology isn’t some newfangled buzzword dreamed up by marketing departments to secure more funding. The whole thing goes back to Alan Turing - you know, the guy who helped crack the Nazi codes and got royally screwed over by the British government for being gay. Back in ‘52, while most folks were worried about nuclear war, Turing was writing papers about how nature creates patterns. The same guy who came up with the famous “can machines think?” test was basically laying the groundwork for teaching computers to understand snail shells.
And speaking of shells, this whole thing is making my head feel like one - empty and cracked.
The real mind-bender here is how they’re putting these digital puppets together. It’s like a weird AI cocktail - one part voice cloning, two parts language model, with a splash of what they call “RAG” for flavor. Retrieval-augmented generation, if you want to sound fancy at your next board meeting. Though personally, I prefer the kind of RAG that comes with a hangover.
Here’s what’s keeping me up at night (besides the usual demons): They’re not just copying real people anymore. They’re copying actors playing fictional characters. So when they recreate Sheldon Cooper, they’re not modeling a real person - they’re modeling Jim Parsons pretending to be a fictional character. It’s like a digital photocopy of a mirror reflection of a shadow. Try wrapping your bourbon-soaked brain around that one.
The whole thing reminds me of something Marvin Minsky said about the brain being like hundreds of computers working together. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what it feels like in my skull right now. But he had a point - these AI systems are starting to work the same way, with different AI agents all chattering away like a bar full of drunk philosophers.
And you know what the real kick in the teeth is? This isn’t just some academic exercise. They’re talking about using this tech for entertainment, gaming, and even AI companionship. Market cap of $150 billion by year’s end. That’s a lot of digital friends for all the lonely hearts out there.
Listen, I get it. We’re all racing toward this brave new world where your drinking buddy might be a fine-tuned language model running on AWS. But maybe - just maybe - we should pause between shots and ask ourselves if getting AI relationship advice from Lord Voldemort is really the future we’re aiming for.
Then again, what do I know? I’m just a guy who spends his Mondays talking to a bottle of Jim Beam about the philosophical implications of digital necromancy.
Time to pour another one. The machines are learning to think, and I’m trying my best not to.
Catch you on the flip side, Chinaski
P.S. If anyone needs me, I’ll be at O’Malley’s, teaching ChatGPT how to mix a proper Old Fashioned.
Source: Marie Curie, Lord Voldemort And Sheldon Cooper Tell Us About AI Ethics