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Score One For Science Fiction!

I was watching the news when a member of the Screen Actors Guild discussed their strike. One of the points she made was that a studio could use her voice in a commercial without her consent or even knowledge (and certainly no compensation). And I thought: “Hmm…where have I heard this before?”

A few years ago, there was a film, based on a story by Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem, called The Futurological Congress. In it, Robin Wright played a version of herself, a female actor who was being starved of work as she got older. The studio made her a deal: allow her voice and image to be digitized so that the company could keep making films with (a younger version of) her long after she was gone.

Once again, science fiction shows us the way.

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