I'm Baby: Digital Reproduction in the Metavese
Hannah Zeavin has a new article out in The Baffler titled "I'm Baby: Digital Reproduction in the Metavese."
From the article:
This video—of a father talking to his baby and a friend—falls into a longstanding genre of parent-child observation. The conversation is banal on its surface, except that the baby in question is no baby at all but a model of the human infant, in two dimensions rather than three, however beautifully rendered. While reactive and interactive, it cannot retreat inside itself or self-soothe. Lacking a psyche or sense of attachment, it still trains its gaze on its parent. It can “play,” but that play is in the service of rote learning, not reality testing, not working through. The baby is a metaphor with an avatar, a cloak for a neural net that learns from inputs—cognitive, biological, and emotional.
Read the article here.