A Constant Visual Feast

A tech dork in New Zealand decided that spending time with his baby was taking away from work, so he programmed a virtual baby with his baby’s likeness, then programmed it to experience stress responses just like a real baby – you know, his real baby. Think about that. Think about how fucked up it is that a father chose to make a simulacrum of his own child and then torture it with human emotions, when his own child is right there for him to care for.

This is the rot at the heart of 99% of big tech endeavors, in which very smart dumbasses, like Mark Sagar, attempt to solve a problem nobody actually needs solved, through the most inhuman means possible. I do not care that Virtual Baby Sagar is not real. That Sagar believes it’s a good idea to make a digital baby capable of performing the same distress as a flesh and blood baby, in the name of science, is nigh-sociopathic at best, and evidence of a god complex at worst, and frankly, he isn’t even the most dangerous doofus interviewed in Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You, either.

I would be as angry about the men at the center of this film without the recent death of my mother lingering in my heart and mind. Yes, yes, objectivity and subjectivity, I get it; different strokes for different folks. Some people love the idea of a ChatBot that pretends to be their dead high school bestie so they can “speak to the dead.” It is, however, as close to an objective problem that this technology exists, and that people are being gulled into using it, because the goal of technology’s authors is never to benefit their users; it’s to benefit themselves, or, I’d argue in the example of Project December’s Jason Rohrer, to amuse themselves.

And the fact of my mom dying certainly exacerbates my disgust with guys like Rohrer and Sagar, who could put their resources to use figuring out how to blunt crises that are affecting people in the real world, like hunger and homelessness and access to medicine and the list goes on, but instead think it’s better to create a video game that makes promises to its consumers that it simply can’t keep. 

I put all of these thoughts into a much more concise argument, personal essay style, for The Daily Beast.