Seeking Immortality (with Paul Bloom)

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🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 74 minutes

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Summary

Would an AI simulation of your dead loved one be a blessing or an abomination? And if you knew that after your own death, your loved ones would create a simulation of you, how would that knowledge change the way you choose to live today? These are some of the questions psychologist Paul Bloom discusses with EconTalk's Russ Roberts as we stand on the threshold of digital immortality.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is March 27, 2024,
0:40.0	and my guest is psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto. His sub-stack is called
0:44.7	Small Potatoes and I love it. This is Paul's sixth appearance on econ talk.
0:50.4	He was last year in December of 2023 talking about whether artificial intelligence
0:55.1	can be moral. Paul welcome back to econ talk.
0:58.3	Glad to be back. Thanks for having me.
1:00.3	I want to let listeners know this episode may touch on some adult or dark themes.
1:06.2	You may want to listen in advance before sharing with children.
1:09.3	And our topic for today is a recent essay on your sub-stack. The title was,
1:14.0	Be Right Back, which described a scenario for the future,
1:17.9	a scenario I would call a certain kind of immortality that you Paul called a blessing and an
1:27.4	abomination which I thought was the perfect framing of what is perhaps I think almost certainly coming for us in the
1:35.2	afterlife that we're about to experience.
1:39.2	What is that Paul?
1:41.2	I like the terms abomination and blessing. There's a nice sort of
1:44.8	biblical resonance to them. And what I'm imagining is a world in which
1:50.2	artificial intelligence is capable of mimicking real people.
1:55.0	And there's all sorts of usages you could imagine this having.
1:59.1	I think a lot of people would enjoy having celebrities in their house
2:01.8	they could interact with on their phones or on their
	...

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