The Market for Scholar Replicas
Justin Weinberg
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