Episode 137 - Total Recall 2012

Have you ever seen Van Gogh's Starry Night? Maybe you saw the AI version circling the internet a few months back where Claude or Chat GPT or whatever cleaned it up and made it look like an actual starry night modelled after the original painting. When I saw that I thought "What is the point of this? It's ostensibly the same image but with everything that made it compelling, beautiful, and good removed by a robot and replaced with sanitary, unremarkable boredom". That's Total Recall 2012. A beautiful and weird and sometimes uncomfortable thing with all that scrubbed away into a perfectly unremarkable smooth white scoop of mashed potatoes. No salt. No butter. We hated it. The High Tech Low Life Podcast is a retrospective of cyberpunk fiction across all forms of media. Film, Television, Literature, Games, and Music are all on the table. In each episode we will revisit the property, it's influences, it's prescience, and enshrine it in the chrome and neon halls of Neo Valhalla. Bluesky: @hightechlowlife.bsky.social Patreon:   / hightechlowlife   Cover art by Gillyvor Theme music by http://www.nihilore.com