Nathan Radke

And people with higher scores would be given preference for getting jobs and enrolling in schools.

And this ran as a trial.

It was a very unpopular idea, but we have the tech for it.

And you could definitely see something like this being implemented on a wider scale.

Yeah.

And this is the classic thing about utopias and dystopias is that they're so close to each other.

This sort of paradise idea that you can conceive of once you start enacting it, of course, humans get in the way and all of our frailties and our flaws.

And it's really, really easy to tip over from utopia into dystopia, especially when you have the kind of reach and the kind of abilities that we have now because of digital media technology.

Yeah, it was season two's Be Right Back, a woman's partner's killed in a car crash, so a company builds her an AI version of him based on his online communications and social media posts.

And again, at first, this makes perfect sense.

Loss is a terrible thing.

Grief is hard to bear.

I remember when my mom died, I spent months wishing that I could at least still text with her a little bit.

And lots of people feel that way about their loved ones.

It's why an entire industry sprung up at the end of the 19th century with people in dark rooms with crystal balls who promised that they could communicate with your dead loved ones.

But of course, these days, who needs crystal balls and incense when you've got AI chatbots?

You could feed all of your loved one's media, social media hot takes and drunken emails into it, mix in a few voice notes so that the chatbot even sounds like the person, and voila, it's as if the person has never died.

Well, what happens is it turns from a subscription model into more of a blackmail model.

I mean, think about what we were just talking about where you can recreate a dead loved one with AI.

I mean, the mediums back in the day in the 19th century, they could use their position as the voice of your dead loved one to take a financial advantage of you.