That moment has stuck with me for many, many years. The heartbreak on her face, combined with my own frustration of knowing that no amount of luck (or skill) will ever be able to flip the bits of that flash chip back to a permutation which contains samples of her loved one's voice.
Fast forward to the present, my own grandmother passed away shortly after the start of 2019. I was able to salvage some of the many voicemails she had left me over the years, despite having had probably five or six cellphones during that period. Why? I used Google Voice, which is part of their Google Takeout data exfiltration program. I was able to download all those voicemails as MP3s, neatly categorized by caller. My grandma was very terse, so most of them are exactly the same: "Robert, can you please call me?", but in spite of that each one is unique and precious to me. A lot of developers think about getting data into their platform, but it seems to me that not as many think about users getting their data, sometimes precious & irreplaceable, back out of the platform.
-Fitz
I'd pay a good amount of money to be able to relive certain experiences from my childhood with that level of immersion
Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't remember which book it was in. Maybe someone who's read him more recently can remember.
Update: Apparently, lots of other people wrote about this too, but PKD wrote about this before any of the ones mentioned so far, as he wrote about this in the 1950's or 60's. I'm not sure if he was the absolute first, however. So if anyone knows of any earlier references, it would be interesting to learn about them.
But I'm thinking of a different PKD book where there were actual artificial personality constructs instead.
This is making me want to re-read some PKD!
It's not bad, but my recommendation is to go into it with the expectation of a Black Mirror episode rather than something you might pay to see in the cinema.
Note: this is different from listening to recordings from the actual person.
Having loved ones die is one of life’s universal terrible qualities.
Clearly losing someone and being able to deal with it is an important life skill but just as we build technology powered aids for other situations, I don't think this would be any different
It would be cathartic, but in this case you wouldn't be talking to them but to a computer, who (at best) is pretending to be them.
I think it's kind of creepy, when you really think about it, and it reminds me of the aversion the creator of Eliza had to his creation when he found out that people were spilling their guts out to it and treating it as a real person.
Which isn't to say that it can't be helpful to talk to something that's not a real person (and especially not a formerly living person you once knew) can't be healing. But if people get confused by these machines in to thinking the machines are actually people close to them that died and are now living again, that will make them vulnerable to some really serious manipulation and delusion.
In the end, I don't know if any of that works. But what's being subscribed doesn't seem too far outside the norm. Deprivation often leads to desperation for even a taste, however imperfect it may be.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/15/741827437/finding-your-voice-...
https://sifted.eu/articles/infibond-investigation-israeli-st...
I lost my dad about 6 years ago after a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis and a 3 month rapid diagnosis. I have some, but not a lot of video content of him from over the years. My mom still misses him terribly so for her 60th birthday I tried to splice together an audio message and greeting from her saying what I thought he would have said.
The work was rough and nowhere near what this Google project could produce. She listens to that poor facsimile every year for her birthday. It's therapeutic for her. With some limits for her mental health of course, I'm sure she would love to hear my dad again with this level of fidelity.
And so would I.