Hologram lecturers thrill students at trailblazing UK university

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/21/hologram-lecturers-thrill-students-at-trailblazing-uk-university

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

8 3 3 years ago

theguardian.com

lupire• 2 years ago

Wow, this is stupid.

3D projection of fake lectures by dead people.

twiddling• 2 years ago

maybe they could have Tupac teach the course

jrussino• 2 years ago

even the most hungover fresher would surely be enticed by a physics lesson from Albert Einstein or a design masterclass from Coco Chanel

Sure, if they were getting real lessons from those people. But this sort of technology only provides "access" to those people in the most superficial of ways. Not really different in kind from having an Albert Einstein NPC in a videogame.

What's more interesting is the idea that we might use some descendant of our current "AI" techniques trained on a person's corpus of work to produce a simulacrum of that person that we can interact with. It does seem like we will someday soon be able to create bots "based on" a person that will carry out a conversation that to some extent captures what that person knew and their way of thinking that is convincing enough that people will want to interact with them. I'd be really surprised if we don't end up in a world where people regularly have discussions with simulations of celebrities, dead relatives, world leaders, professors, etc.

Do we have enough "training data" to simulate an Einstein or a Feynman? Maybe, but I kind of doubt it (although I don't doubt people will try). But as more and more of our thoughts and discussions are recorded and archived it seems like more and more plausible. Especially so for public figures. Joe Rogan is the first person who comes to mind for me, as he has now over 6,000 hours of recorded conversations.

(as an aside: I imagine that at a certain point it would have been easy for Stephen Hawking to store every word he ever "spoke"; is anybody aware of him having ever mentioned something like that?)

But yeah, this particular work is really just describing a surface-level representation. Cool as a tool but not interesting enough in and of itself for the educational context it's being proposed for.

Hologram lecturers thrill students at trailblazing UK university

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