>Yet soon a social media missive critical of the attraction from Walt's granddaughter would go viral. It raised anew ethical questions that often surround any project attempting to capture the dead via technology, be it holographic representations of performers or digitally re-created cinematic animations, namely debates surrounding the wishes of the deceased and whether such creations are exploitative.<p>Exactly the same reaction happened when Disney developed the first Abraham Lincoln animatronic for the New York World’s Fair in the 1960’s.
Surely if there is one person in history who we would be pretty sure would be thrilled to have a posthumous animatronic version of himself, it is Walt Disney.
in the 80s AVG built a robotic Andy Warhol but he was enthused about it. Abraham lincoln is an American icon. Not sure someone who still has family in living memory is the same category despite being a sort of icon for a big corporation and a big emerging ethical concern of the 21st century seems to be bodily autonomy and consent. I see a lot of AI generated 'animated' photos, of the living and the dead. I tend to see a lot of people ignore someone's consent like they ignore media piracy, with a disinterested immoral hand-wave.
The problem I see with this is just the lack of originality. Disneyland originally focused on subjects like early America, the frontier or the future.
This robot is about the guy who built a company that focused on that. It's very self referential. Couldn't they do something new like a Louis Armstrong robot that plays trumpet?
So Robot Chicken wasn't lying to me!<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LymbI4Dxj4c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LymbI4Dxj4c</a>