Epstein didn’t kill himself and he’s still alive and the body is from a lookalike they killed to fake his death. Is that good enough conspiracy theory?
The pry action still works fine. The little weapon to eat food with might be fun but might be the most useless thing here. Pot is great for carrying water from the well on your back. I can think of a few uses for the last one.
You know how adblock has blocklists… what if we had shareable lemmy blocklists like that? Anyone could create a blocklist and you could import into your client. Would be pretty sweet.
Entertainment might be pointless to some. I dream of having an on-demand Netflix that will generate whatever type of content I can imagine on demand, or better yet already know my preferences and all I have to do is tell it my mood and it will start playing something I would like.
Other than the obvious malicious uses of this technology, it could be great for multimedia, great for creative control for cast, great for virtual meetings to always look “your best” (as determined by each individual, e.g. clean-cut pristine, and/or preferred gender, and/or favorite anime, etc.). There are also use cases to hear letters spoken by a lost loved one, or replace the Three Stooges with politicians. Tons of “safe” use cases that I am looking forward to.
The author you're thinking of is Neal Stephenson, and the book is "Snow Crash" published in 1992. In the book, he coined the term "ractors" for actors who perform in front of motion-capture cameras to create lifelike animations. He also predicted the use of CGI and AI in filmmaking to create movies with long-dead actors.
I haven’t read it and the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to mention virtual actors, so it could be wrong. At least it didn’t hallucinate a fake book.