https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-unveils-new-ai-tool-for-alexa-to-turn-a-speech-snippet-into-a-voice
Marcus confronted me a month or more ago with something along the lines of " who says learning isn't just imitation? ", and it *really* hit home. Play seems to be a lot about mock-work and mock-fighting and it seems widely accepted that a great deal of learning happens through emulation of the expertise of others.
When I consider those who have passed in my life, I think I much prefer to hear-through-memory their voices (and visages) over recordings. Synthesizing voices or visages seems to compound the uncanny valley effect. Bad enough to get it eeriely-nearly right with something less visceral than the affect of a loved one since passed.
During the first gulf war (1991) I worked with a voice/speech researcher who "went dark" for about a year. He remained cagey about this work even after he came out of that period of silence and misdirection, but eventually the general nature of the work was declassified (though not details) and it was about synthesizing voices by modeling the vocal tract, and the application that made it so skitchy was battlefield communications of Saddam Hussein. This was still in an era of analog communication with various analog scrambling techniques standing in for what we do today with digital encryption and authentication. I have no idea if it was ever deployed or effective operationally, but the examples he used for demonstration with well known voices. I doubt anyone could argue that this speech synthesizer in any way "thought" like Saddam Hussein, but the larger organizational unit (Iraq army), might well "act as if" the intention injected by the synthesized voice was part of their collective psyche.
Back to the original premise of whether a well-enough practiced/trained learning classifier system has any emergent properties that are parallel to animal/human cognition. This seems entirely up in the air to me, but Glen's recent rant/rave about "what it's like" and splitters v smooshers was mildly compelling to me.
A big shift in my own perception of self/change was when someone I respected offered the idea of "trying it on" and "acting as if" as a model for personal transformation. In retrospect it seems obvious that by emulating some *one* (real or idealized) one might actually become *more like* that person (real or idealized). Of course, this is about a change of affect/self/consciousness, not emerging from whole cloth (sand?).
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