A Holographic Wedding

a lot of questions. Now, some of those questions are actually technical, right, some of them are ethical, some of them are just downright skeptical. So, for example, what does she mean by hologram? That is a term that really means a specific thing but frequently gets misused to me other things. And then who developed the AI and how was it trained? And what does she specifically mean by AI?

Are we talking just strictly generative AI? So essentially, you know, a chat bought type thing like you know, open AIS, chat GPT. Is that what she means by AI? Does she mean something beyond just a generative AI? Is it AI that would have some form of control over the hologram? I mean presumably that would happen right, Like the AI would be able to determine where the hologram could be directing its quote unquote attention, all that kind of stuff, like,

how is the AI supposed to sense her? What elements? What technical elements are there so that the hologram AI has a quote unquote awareness of where she happens to be. You know, if you're with an actual other person, they can direct their attention toward you in very way, But a hologram can't do that on its own right. You would have to pair it with something else, like a camera system or something, and have some computer vision elements to process that in order for the hologram to face

the correct way. Like, there are a lot of technical questions that go along with this. Also, to what extent, if any, will any agency of authority recognize this union if she's to get married to a hologram? What does that mean? Does it? I don't think it actually means getting married in a legal sense. It is more of

a symbolic thing, which is fine. This is an artist we're talking about, and in fact, the purpose of her art is largely to ask questions that we don't necessarily have the answers to So this isn't just me being frustrated.

I mean, some of it is frustrating, but it's also the point of the whole exercise is to start asking questions like what does this mean for the future, because Alicia on her website or someone on her behalf points out that in the future we are likely to see cases of people wanting to have actual relationships with artificial constructs. I mean, we've already seen examples of that before with AI, like boyfriends and girlfriends to varying degrees of success, and

so it's really just an extension of that. Now, keeping in mind that Framus has made a career out of exploring the depths of human experience, including loneliness, it's only fair that we acknowledge the artistic element of this event. Is what I was just saying a second ago. I mean, you could call this just a stunt, and to some extent I could see that being a fair assessment saying

this is kind of a stunt. But you know, we also have to admit that AI is playing an increasingly larger role in our lives, for good and for ill, and keeping in mind AI means lots of stuff right. It's not just the jurni of AI. We see AI being incorporated all over the place. Some cases it's not nearly as obvious, but it's certainly there, and like it or not, things like AI and robotics are going to play a part in physical relationships in the future as well.

We humans are complicated creatures, and sometimes it means we might find it challenging or even impossible to find another human with whom we can share ourselves, and perhaps it might be easier to engineer a simulation of a person to fill those needs. This, of course, is not a groundbreaking idea. There are plenty of science fiction stories that

have explored this concept thoroughly. There's the phenomenal science fiction film from twenty fourteen titled Ex Makina, in which a narcissistic tech billionaire brings a computer programmer to a remote mansion to judge whether a female presenting robot has self awareness and true intelligence that has elements of romantic feeling

between a human and a robot. Or there's the equally phenomenal nineteen eighty seven film Making Mister Right, in which John Malkovich plays both an anti social human engineer and his robotic duplicate who seems to actually be more human than his human creator. And I'm being a little cheeky when I say that Making Mister Wright is equal to X mock it Up. I don't actually believe that, but it is a movie, and it does explore this idea

from a romantic comedy perspective. Anyway, most of these science fiction stories at some point explore what it means to be human, or what intelligence actually means, whether an artificial construct can experience emotional connections, what effect this could have on humanity as a whole, and a host of other philosophical and ethical concepts. And based on what I've read, Alicia Framus is looking at the issue from a very human perspective. Can we seek and receive emotional fulfillment from

an AI creation? But before we get into all that, let's talk about the tech. Because this is tech stuff. We need to talk about holograms and artificial intelligence in general. And this is going to be tricky because in most of the articles I've come across, there's a distinct lack of technical information about Framus's project. There are plenty of photographs in which Framos appears with a ghostly image of

a man. In fact, I can't help but walk away with the impression that Framus is engaged to a forced ghost from the Star Wars universe, because that's what it looks like. But these are clearly manufactured images, right, These are not actual pictures of her with a hologram. It's just pictures that go along with the concept of her artistic project. There's not really a holographic rogue gentleman posing with Framus in a courtyard, because that would be very

hard to pull off. Any sort of three dimensional projection would require a lot of equipment, and you couldn't just have some hologram spawned taneously appear in any given location. That's not how they work. It's not like you know in Quantum Leap or Star Trek or you know, a Red Dwarf probably the best example. There's no way for a hologram to just be free roaming, and of course it wouldn't be a hologram anyway, but we'll get into that,

it's not really a hologram. So according to numerous pieces, and I suspect all of these pieces traced back to like a single press release on the matter, because a lot of it seems to be pulling from Alisha Framus's own website. The figure that will accompany Alisha Framus at the wedding ceremony the summer in Rotterdam will be a quote unquote holographic sculpture. Now that can mean lots of

different things. It could mean that there's an actual physical figure like a mannequin, like a blank mannequin, and this hologram quote unquote will be projected or otherwise displayed on the figure, sort of like a three D mapping projection thing. Because again, it's really hard for me to imagine a freestanding, ephemeral hologram made up of only light saying I do. It's not that it would be impossible, but you would have to put in a whole lot of work to

create the projectors. And maybe that is what's going to happen. I mean, this is a big artistic project, so maybe there will be the equipment. But doing this you need a lot of control over your environment in order for it to have the right effect, because if you have too much ambient light, it's really going to mess things up. So let's talk about light and holograms. Now, this is a very complicated topic. And I want to say that.

You know, back when I worked at houstuffworks dot com, our senior writer, our head writer, Tracy Wilson, who is now one of the co hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class, she nearly went bananas working on this article. She did a phenomenal job. By the way, I'm not no shade on Tracy. She did far better writing this article than I would have. And I say that because it's very challenging to break down a hologram into a simple concept that you can explain, because it's one of

those things where it's like an onion. In order to understand the hologram, you peel away a layer and you say, well, we really need to talk about interference, and we need to talk about things like reflection and refraction. We need to talk about how light travels as a wave or a particle. Then you strip it away again. You start getting further and further down, and you realize, oh, my starting point is so far back that this article is going to last fifty pages or this podcast will go

four hours. We're not gonna do that. We're going to take a much more service level approach, because one it would take me a lot more time to really get my head wrapped around it, because while I did take physics in school and I loved physics, it has been like thirty years since I took those courses, and I would have to do a whole lot of research in order to dust the ring rust off my my brain and then I could maybe tackle it. So we talk

about holograms. It means a specific thing, and one way to really break it down is to start with how a normal photograph works to contrast it with a hologram. So let's talk about photography. And with photography, you've got your camera and you point your camera at something interesting. Let's say it's your favorite tech podcaster ordering a burrito at a food truck, something that happens on a fairly frequent basis. And here's what happens. When you push the

button to actually take the picture. Light from the scene, light reflecting off of your subject, in this case a tech podcaster ordering a brito. Light from that reflects off of those objects and enters into the camera through the lens, and the lens focuses the light to a point that's actually behind a shutter. So when the shutter's closed, no light can pass beyond that. But the shutter when you push the button opens and this shutter could be mechanical,

it could be electronic. You know, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this. The point is that it allows light to come through. The light moves through an opening called the aperture, and then it passes to hit a medium, a recording medium, which could be film in the old days, or it could be a digital sensor. Probably a digital sensor. I mean, unless you happen to like shooting on film, and maybe you do. It's pretty cool.

I enjoy it. The medium makes a record of the light that entered in through the scene, and what you end up with is a two dimensional image of whatever it was you were taking a photo of, in this case tech podcast or ordering a brito. Now, as you're aware, this image is limited to a single angle. You know, the angle what you were at when you took the photo. You can't turn the image around in the photo and see what you know. I I'm sorry, I mean your

favorite tech podcaster look like on the opposite side. You can't flip it around, say oh, and here's the backside of that photograph. You're just limited to that single perspective. Now, let's go a step further and talk about three D photography. Now, one way to achieve a three D effect would be to use two cameras, and these two cameras would be slightly offset from each other, similar to how your eyes are offset from each other. Right, you have one toward

the left, one toward the right. So when you're looking at something, your brain is taking in visual information from two slightly different angles and then combining that into a single image in your brain, and the two cameras will take a picture at the same time from slightly different perspectives, kind of mimicking that physical effect. You then present this pair of images that are offset from one another, and you do it in such a way that the viewer

will get a different image for each eye. And you can use various filters to do this. So in the old days, back in the mid twentieth century, like the nineteen fifties, you might use a real cheap pair of three D glasses where you have a red filmilter for one eye and a blue filter for the other eye.

And so let's say it's red for the right, blue for the left, and in one of the sets of images you would have it tinted blue, which would be blocked by the blue lens, so that eye, the left eye would not see that set of images, but the right eye would. The other set of images would be tinted red, so your right eye behind the red filter would not see those images. It'd be filtered out by the lens in front of your eye, so your left eye would get one set of images, your right eye

would get the other set of images. Your brain would combine the two in your head, and voila, you have what appears to be a three dimensional shape in front of you. Now these days, you're more likely to use a different method like polarized light, and you would have light polarized in one way so that the left eye would see those sets of images, and polarize the different way so the right eye would see those set of images,

and again your brain combines it. The brain part is the same, it's just how you end up filtering out one set versus another. So that's how most three D films work these days. You can also have active three D glasses. These have electronic shutters in them, and they're timed so that they turn off and on in time with the sets of images that are displayed on a screen.

So the left eye gets one set, the right eye gets another set, and what's actually happening is your screen is alternating these sets, but doing so at a very very high frequency that you wouldn't necessarily notice without the

glasses on. Now, the point is this approach creates a three D effect, but you're still working under limitations because while the image will appear to have depth to it, like it'll look like it's coming off the screen, or that the screen itself has depth, you can't walk around the image and view it from different angles. It can look like you might be able to do that, but then if you were to get up and move to a different part of the room, you would not actually

have a change in perspective. It would still be the same. It would still have depth, but it wouldn't have changed perspective at all. There's no parallax, and parallax is quote the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points, not on a straight line with the object end quote. That's according to Merriam Webster. So to achieve parallax, you would need a way to project a hologram, which we will talk

about after we take this quick break. All right, To talk about holograms, we do have to understand a little bit about how light works and that it travels in waves, but it also can travel as a particle. We know that because of quantum physics. But we're going to leave that for now. We're just going to talk about the waves. So waves are of the same type, can interact with

each other. Right, You see this in water, So a classic example in keeping water and light behave in different ways, but it's similar enough that we can kind of make this analogy. But if you have a still pond, and you've got two pebbles, and you drop those two pebbles where they are a couple of feet away from each other, When they make contact with the water, they obviously each cause ripples to radiate outward from the point of contact.

And because you drop these two pebbles fairly close to each other, the ripples from one are going to interact with the ripples of another, and they will end up interfering with one another. Well, the same sort of thing happens with light. So to create a traditional hologram on film, that's one way to create a hologram. The basic approach is to use a laser and a beam splitter, and you put whatever subject it is that you want to

capture as a hologram. Let's say it's a vintage nineteen eighties action figure of mister T. You put that in line with a path for part of this laser beam. So you direct this laser beam through the beam splitter, which, as its name implies, splits the beam into two identical lasers, and one of those beams ends up following down a path and is directed by mirrors to hit mister T. And this is the object beam. It's the object beam because it's the beam that actually interacts with the object.

Some of the light reflects off of mister T and hits your recording medium, so our holographic film in this case, the film it gets this light hit and captures the information. Now the other beam, because remember we split into two, the other beam goes down a different path from the first one, and mirrors redirect it so that this beam hits the recording medium directly. It does not interact with mister T. It pities the fool. Instead, it just hits

the holographic film. So this is what we call the reference beam, and the reference beam and the object beam interact at the medium. There's interference created by these two beams, and the result is that the recorded data on that film allows for the creation of the hologram. It contains the information, and after developing the film and by illuminating it in a specific way, which depends upon your method of creating the hologram in the first place, you can

create an image that appears to have three dimensions. Now we're talking about film here, right, so we are still talking about a picture. The picture itself is effectively two dimensional, technically has three dimensions, but it's thin, so you don't

really think of it that way. It's like a piece of paper, right, But the image on this photograph would appear to have three dimensions, right, Like you would stand in front of the photograph and you'd be able to lean to the left or lean to the right and see different angles of the imaged object. But you couldn't do a full three hundred and sixty degree walk around of it, because again, it's a photograph, right, It's just like a regular picture. If you were to walk around,

you would just see the back of the photograph. It would just be a blank surface, but from the front, from the viewing angles, you could see different three dimensional aspects of this object. And that's a really cool effect. That is a hologram. And you might say, well, that doesn't sound like a freestanding hologram, not the way that Alicia Framus is talking about, and it's not because a lot of the stuff that gets billed as a hologram

isn't really a hologram at all. It's something else, and it could be one of many things if you think about like the hologram of Tupac Shakur at the twenty twelve Coachella Festival. Now, Tupac Shakur was killed in nineteen ninety six, so obviously a tragic moment, and this was like a triumphant moment to see Tupac Shakur performing in front of a live crowd at twenty twelve's Coachella. And it was said to have been a hologram, like a holographic image of Shakur performing in front of the crowd.

It wasn't a hologram. Instead, it was an example of a very old effect called Pepper's ghost illusion. It actually traces its history back to the nineteenth century, and it takes its name from a guy named John Henry Pepper who was an inventor in the United Kingdom and involves a few different elements. So you have your audience who happen to be in a very specific place, right, Like, you can't do Pepper's Ghost in theater in the round,

it wouldn't work. But if your audience is in a specific spot relative to the stage, you can do it. So you need your staging area as in the actual place where the audience is viewing. Then you need the hidden staging area it's outside of the audience's view. And then you have to have an angled, transparent and reflective surface at a forty five degree angle, and that's important. You need to be able to see through the surface

because otherwise you're just looking at a screen, right. You need to be able to have it be reflective or else slight. It's not going to be able to really interact with it in a meaningful way, and it has to be angled in order to get the proper effect for the audience. So the angled surface, which typically is something like a pane of very very clean glass, acts as a sort of reflective screen and performers in the hidden room are very well lit. So again, this hidden room,

the audience can't see it. It's off to the side, and it has a straight line to the reflective surface, but not to the audience's point of view. And it's very well lit because it needs to be bright enough so that the glass, the angle glass, captures the reflection

of the performers. The audience can then see the reflections, and because the reflections are on transparent glass, and because they can see through the glass or whatever other material is being used, they can have the effect of these figures being incorporated in the scene that's on the stage. Those figures can also appear in substantial and you get this ghost effect. So in depending upon how you've lit the stage and the figures that are in the hidden room,

they might look transparent ghostly. You could even have other actors on stage, like live actors on stage within the audience's view and they can appear to interact with the ghostly figures that are also present. So it's a pretty cool effect. If you've ever ridden the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland or disney World, you've seen this effect in action. There's a large ballroom scene that features numerous ghosts, and these ghosts fade in and out of view in front

of your eyes. They are actually reflections created by Pepper's ghost. Above and below your doom buggy track. There are staging areas with these figures in them, so they're above you and below you, and the areas that they're in have lights that turn on and turn off, so when the lights come on, then you can see the reflection of

the figures. When the lights go off, the reflections disappear, So the effect you have is that these ghostly images manifest and then disappear in front of your very eyes. In a similar way, special effects folks can create the illusion of a person being an event, even if they happen to have shuffled off the moral coil, or maybe they're not even a real person. Maybe it's an animated character. So rather than a pane of glass, the effects artists

might use what's called a pepper scrim surface. This is a metallic gauze that you can see through. In fact, it's invisible to the naked eye, and it acts as like a reflective screen for projections, and these projections typically are digital rather than a reflection of a physical object. So instead of having a hidden room where you've got a light that is allowing the reflection to hit this surface, you've got a projector and you're just projecting onto the

surface directly. That's how Tubac showed up at Coach. It's also how various anime singers are able to appear at real world concerts. And these are not holograms, right, It's not any different honestly from using just a projector and a screen, because like a projector in the screen, you can't walk around that, you can't view it from different angles and get that parallax effect. And you know, if you did try to walk around it, you wouldn't have

the experience of looking at a three dimensional figure. But folks often will refer to these projections as holograms. I'm here to remind you that words mean things, and that when we misuse words, we just create confusion. Now, I don't know if Framus is intended is going to be a Pepper's Ghost illusion. I don't know if if quote unquote he I don't know. I don't know what pronoun to use it. I don't know if it is going to be a Pepper's Ghost illusion. It's possible she could

use something like a volumetric display. It's unlikely, but she could. This is actually a pretty broad category of technologies, and in fact, I would need to do a episode just on volumetric displays to really tackle it properly. But generally speaking, they allow for the display of three dimensional images without the audience needing to wear special glasses or headgear. So sometimes they call it, you know, glasses free three D. But the point is there's still a display, right, There's

still a physical display in play here. It's a medium upon which light reflects. And it could be that the volumetric display is actually in motion. It's spinning or otherwise moving rapidly, far faster than we can see. But the medium is moving in such a way as to reflect light at the specific locations it needs to in order to create the illusion of a three dimensional image. So it's still a surface. And I say this only to point out that volumetric displays can be really impressive, but

they're also stationary, right. They're not something again that you could just have as a free, roaming three dimensional hologram wandering around your house. You would have to have very specific locations where the hologram would be able to appear. The same could be said for so called solid light projections. These are also really cool, but again you need to have the projectors to make it work, and they aren't gonna go anywhere. These are big, big pieces of equipment.

These are able to project light in such a way that they can create the illusion of a three dimensional object appearing within a physical space, and in order to do that, you have to have very specific control of the lighting environment, otherwise you're going to have issues. And you also have to again have these physical projectors set up at specific locations in order to achieve the effect you want. And it's very limiting. It's a cool effect.

I've seen videos of never seen one in person, by the way, I've just seen video of them in action. But they work for like a permanent exhibit, right Like if you were to go to a museum, a science museum or something that had one of them, you could see a really cool effect, but you wouldn't see that

object moving around the whole space. You would have to go through a lot of trouble to set up all the hard ware you needed in order to create multiple locations that a quote unquote hologram could travel in order for you to have like a realistic interaction with a spouse in your home, you wouldn't be able to have your holographic spouse accompany you while you pop out to the shops to get your bits and bobs. That just

wouldn't happen. And like I said, I could do a whole series of episodes on things like volumetric displays and solid light, but we still need to talk about the AI element and Framus's proposal. The holographic element is just one half of it, and again we don't have enough information to really tackle it in a meaningful way, except to say that when she says hologram, she probably doesn't

actually mean hologram. According to the pieces I read, the AI is supposed to draw from Framus's own romantic past, and she says it's supposed to incorporate elements and characteristics from people in her past relationships. Now, to achieve that, the engineers have to train the AI on people that Framus formerly had romantic relationships with, and to do that, they're going to turn largely to social platforms. Okay, we're

going to take another quick break. When we come back, we're going to tackle what this means and the ethical implications that accompany it. But first, let's take another quick break to think are sponsors? Okay? So Alicia Framus plans to train this AI on the social platforms of her past romantic relationships. This raises some pretty serious ethical questions, at least for me. Is it ethical to create an

artificially intelligent construct based off of real people? Now? I don't know if her exes have given their consent to this, like if they said, oh, it's fine if you train this AI on my social platforms. I hope that they've given their consent, because otherwise this gets really creepy really fast. I mean, let me just give you a simple example. Let's say that there's a creepy person who has developed

an obsessive attraction toward someone else. And this creepy person, for whatever reason, either feels that they have no shot with this object of their desire, or they legitimately don't have a shot. Maybe the object of their desires already in a committed relationship and has no interest in pursuing

anything else. Whatever the case, so the creepy person has decided, you know what I'll do is I'll just create an AI version of this person, and I'm going to train the AI on this person's social media and I'm going to create a copy of them that gets pretty creepy, right, Like it's removing consent, it's removing agency from the object of desire. You could argue, well, ultimately the creepy person is developed is completely committing their focus to a construct

and not the actual person. I'm not sure that that's healthy either, but it just it gives off some uncomfortable vibes. And also we have to keep in mind that the person we present on social media, right, the version of us that we present to the world often is not a true reflection of who we are. Right, A lot of folks will put forth their best self on social media and the leave out stuff that perhaps is maybe less complementary. And this is just a natural kind of

thing that a lot of let's go with. Right. We get on these social platforms and we want to show how exciting our day is, how amazing, this meal is, this gorgeous location we happen to be at, But we're not showing all the more mundane, humdrum stuff or the negative stuff that's going on in our lives not nearly to the same extent, So any AI trained version of a person is likely to be a poor representation or

at least an incomplete representation of that person. So there's some real gray areas here already about creating an AI that is at least in part based on a person or multiple people. But anyway, for Alicia Framus's project, the AI is being called ai Lex or Alex or Ilex or just Alex. I don't know, although arguably this is not just the name of the AI, it's the name of the part and parcel package of the AI and

the quote unquote holographic sculpture. Beyond the ethical is I really wonder how effective Alex is going to be as a simulation of a person, because we have seen some phenomenal strides and generative AI capabilities over the last few years, but we've also seen time and again how these technologies can run up against limitations, right, whether it's an AI construct going off the rails by making offensive content like I'm reminded of when Microsoft launched an AI tool that

it took down in less than twenty four hours because it started spouting off some terrible stuff due to people specifically making it do that, or we get cases of AI hallucinating or confabulating, if you prefer that term, which is when they start producing incorrect answers to queries. You know, rather than saying I don't know the answer to that, they just invent one based upon statistical probabilities of words

that should follow in a sentence. We're all familiar with cases in which AI just can come up, so one wonders how that could play out in the context of a relationship. Now, on the flip side, you could argue, yeah, sure, AI could make some really bad mistakes and start making stuff up when they don't really know what they're talking about. But then human beings do that too. Being in a relationship with another human being is bound to include times

when you are at odds with one another. Whether it's a misunderstanding or it's a disagreement or an out and out fight, These things do happen. So you could argue, why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we would hold an actual human person. And I don't

really have an answer to that. I just know that, you know, when we talk about AI, we know about the shortcomings of AI, and so knowing that and thinking about how that could impact and implementation of AI, in which it's supposed to stand in for a romantic partner.

It raises these questions. Now. According to Alicia Framus's own website, the artist is quote passionate about dedicating her soul and body to science and art in order to develop deeper relationships and assist individuals with congenital or acquired diseases, physical disabilities, gender imbalances in certain countries, social requirements and stereotypes in different cultures, as well as those who have experienced trauma or suffer from agloraphobia, disfigurement, or fear end quote. Now

put that way, this all sounds admirable. It really puts this work into a different context because this is one that trends toward accessibility. Now, in general, I'm in favor of technologies that grant people access to things and experiences that they might otherwise not have or have difficulty accessing. Increasing agency is a really noble goal in my opinion. But there are other questions that I have and I haven't seen answers to them yet. For example, where will

this AI be hosted? This is getting back to the technical site. Where does the AI live, not like within her house, but literally where is the AI living on a computer? What physical machines are going to provide the processing power for this AI? I presume it's going to be cloud based, as AI functionality really requires a hefty amount of processing power. Now, it could be a strictly local installation, which is entirely possible. That just doesn't seem

likely to me, but it is possible. Like wherever Sheep lands on holding this exhibition and showing off these various performances, it could be that the AI instance is locally living there. But then how is the AI going to manipulate the holographic element? How are these two different technological pieces linked? Because again, generative AI doesn't just magically know how to control a projection. Will the hologram, in whatever form it

takes be a digital puppet? In other words, will it be a digital construct and its mouth will move in accordance to whatever sounds are being generated by the generative AI part? The body of the hologram is not the same thing as the AI simulated personality. This is kind of weird to think about, Like, there's not an easy analogy we can make. I guess you could say, well, imagine that your brain is in a jar, but you're still able to control your otherwise brainless body as it

moves around. They are two separate things in this scenario that would be similar to what we're talking about here. But of course that's not the way our bodies work. Our brains are incorporated within our bodies. They are when we think of ourselves, we don't break it down, we don't compartmentalize typically whether or not we're talking about our body or our brain, like it's just us. But for this AI construct, that's just not the case. It's separate

things that are linked together, but they are separate. That being said, there are other ethical and social considerations that we should take into it count and arguably this is

the very point of Alicia Framus's work. So, for example, in some parts of the world, there are regions that have an aging population, so you have a larger number of older people and a smaller number of younger people, and as those numbers for younger people get smaller, those generations may start to find it challenging to find a

romantic partner. And it's possible that opening up this Pandora's box of forming relationships with artificially intelligent beings could really exacerbate problems in those regions because people who might feel lonely could turn to tech to feel that void, which is understandable. But could that make it worse for the society overall, where it removes their desire to go out and find another human companion and thus perpetuate that society.

Could this cure for loneliness ironically speed up social collapse in those regions? Now, this doesn't to me sound like an outlandish hypothesis. I don't think it would be you know, instantaneous or anything. But I do think it could make the problem more challenging. But I'm not ready to say

it's a foregone conclusion. It may be that perhaps people would try this and for maybe some small percentage it would seem to really take hold, and for maybe other people they just say, no, this isn't what I need. So that leads to another question. Can AI actually provide the companionship that people desire? You've likely heard research suggests that people who have meaningful social relationships, and married people in particular, typically have longer life expectancies than those who

lack those meaningful social relationships. So can an AI or robot provide the depth and meaning in a relationship that would then lead to this benefit, assuming that the research is drying on accu conclusion, that is, because it's possible that it's not. But assuming the research is accurate, would AI actually help reduce feelings of depression and isolation? Would it lead to healthier and longer lifespans. That's a question

we just don't know the answer to. Or would it just seem that it would on a surface level fulfill the need but ultimately not provide those benefits. We don't know. Alicia Framus is likely exploring some of these questions and lots of other ones that haven't even thought about in

her work. That's likely the point of this. I would never ask an artist to go into depth about the point of their work unless that was something they wanted to talk about, because often artists present things and while they might have their own intent their content, to let the world interpret their work, however the world does. She's also looking at, you know, some other mundane questions like is it possible to secure a mortgage for a home with a holographic co signer? Or can you design a

home that allows for a holographic occupant. So again, like we talked about, all of these different ways of producing quote unquote holograms that aren't really holograms require that you have a lot of equipment, right, You have to have a lot of equipment and a lot of special conditions to allow for this manifestation, and that means like lots of projectors and controlled lighting and all this kind of stuff.

Could you create a home that has enough of this to simulate the experience of having an actual spouse wandering through your house? Or is that impractical? I think it's impractical. Maybe not impossible, but I certainly think it's impractical. And then you could argue, well, if you have a house that's fully outfitted with all this equipment, where a quote unquote hologram could wander through the house freely, then you could probably also just have like a whole bunch of

cloned versions of this person. You know, if you have all these different projectors, all the projectors could be producing a version of this person, and then you just have clones of your spouse in every room. But you know, I don't know, I don't know how they're doing it because there's no technical information available from what I can tell. I suppose we're just going to learn a lot more. When Framous's project officially gets off the ground this summer.

That's when the set of performances will begin, and the full set of performances are grouped under the title The Hybrid Couple. So I will keep an eye out and see about following up on this story as it unfolds. I still have questions about how this is going to work from a technical standpoint, but again it's because of a lack of information. I'm not saying that it's impossible to pull off. I'm just curious what method they're using or methods. Maybe they're using a collection of different ones.

I don't know. But it is an interesting project and one that I think has merit because it is asking questions that we are going to have to answer. Even if you would argue this is far too early and that this version is an unrealistic version of what we can expect in the future, it still raises the questions that we will have to answer because this is something that is going to be part of our future. People

have already developed feelings for AI chatbots. If you want to see a really good video essay about this with maybe some content warnings in there. Check out Sarah Z and is Sarah Z for all my fellow Americans on YouTube. She has a piece called the Rise and Fall of Replica that's our ep L I KA, in which she talks about an AI generated companion program that ended up having some massive changes along the way due to various reasons.

But he has a good piece that kind of looks at this from the AI standpoint, and I think it's a valuable essay, one that is entertaining, interesting, and a little disturbing at points, but it kind of explores the same sort of area. I think Alicia Framus is looking at similar things, although from perhaps a slightly less salacious perspective than Replica was when it first launched. So check that out if you like. Sarah Z does great video essays.

I don't know her, never interacted with her, so I just like her work and I recommend checking that out. It is an hour long, so it is a bit of a commitment, but it's worth viewing, and yeah, I'm interested to see how this plays out again. Still have lots of questions, both technical and otherwise, but you could argue that is the purpose of art. Or one of

art's purposes. I don't want to pigeonhole why art exists or what it's for, but I would say that raising questions is definitely part of it, and if that's true, then goal achieved. I have lots of questions, so we'll come back to this. But I think it is a really interesting topic to contemplate. What is AI's role in the future when it comes to things like personal relationships and is it ultimately something that could be beneficial or have a negative impact on us or is it more

complicated than that. Is it a combination. I suspect it is a combination of some sort. But there you go. That is my take so far on Alicia Framans's project to marry an AI quote unquote hologram. And we'll see how this plays out this summer summer of twenty twenty four. In case some of you are listening from the future, in which case maybe you're already, you know, attending a holographic wedding, in which case, what do you get? Where

do they register? Okay, that's it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.