When you are a notoriously geeky tech billionaire, having an AI clone of yourself built and trained on all your books and public videos and then interviewing yourself probably seems like a good idea. Netflix founder Reid Hoffman just did that and started by asking his clone to summarize one of his books in the fictional Star Trek language of Klingon.
It’s a bit of fun to introduce a wildly controversial idea: realistic AI clone is nearly indistinguishable from the real person it was trained on.
As you watch this interview, you’ll have to admit the depiction is pretty realistic. In the conversation, Reid does briefly tackle the big question about the ethics of this technology while simultaneously dismissing it as relatively unimportant in his case because he’s “doing it collaboratively.”
Is permission enough here? What happens if others get their hands on his clone and use it in their own ways which may not be so innocent? And is the idea that an AI clone of any of us can actually be controlled an illusion in itself? This raises so many questions, which may not be answered fully for a decade or longer.
