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   Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 12-Oct-2026 21:20:33 JST Rich Felker

   • datarama

   @datarama And like AI, the scifi bullshit around cloning was all taking advantage of the audience not understanding any of it and muddling a very boring thing (artificially producing something close to a twin, artificially producing something superficially resembling human language) with something that bamboozles them ("copying a person", "machine is thinking").

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     datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 12-Oct-2026 21:27:32 JST datarama

     in reply to

     @dalias Ishiguro's story (which is the one that's stuck with me most from the clone panic) got it pretty right, I think. Children who were basically identical twins born some 30-40 years after their wealthy "twin". His clones were just people; they weren't grown in vats and released full-formed into the world - they had childhoods and everything.

     (and were intended from birth - often by a surrogate mother who was also a clone - to be harvested for organs to keep the "twin" living indefinitely, since this was a dystopian sf story.)

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 12-Oct-2026 21:35:06 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • datarama

     @datarama The more I think about it the more I love this analogy. "Cloning" was indeed a much earlier instance of copying the AI playbook of coining a misleading word to get press and funding for your research.

     (Yes, copying *from* AI - the AI scam does back over half a century!)

     Using a word, "cloning", which should mean doing something like a Star Trek transporter accident to a living being, making two full copies of the same being. Not "something like a twin, but with less in common".