The Market for Scholar Replicas

Why should a department hire some fresh PhD when it could instead hire Derek Parfit, Daniel Dennett, Judy Thomson, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Barcan Marcus, or David Lewis? You might say: “How could a department hire these people? They’re dead!” True. But it is only a matter of time before AI-based “replicas” of them exist. Imagine a sophisticated, well-trained language model paired with some video or holographic technology, and you get the idea. Instead of hiring a person, a department could purchase a subscription to some corporation’s AI replica of a well-known scholar. Think of the savings! Such replicas have been in development for a while. Readers may recall Luciano Floridi‘s bot, described in a post here two years ago. It was trained on his works so that it could not only answer questions about what he says in them, but also offer suggestions as to what he might think about topics not covered in those works. There’s also a bot version of Peter Singer. That was just an academic…