It’s Halloween week and the undead are everywhere, infiltrating even serious-minded Storyville documentaries on BBC4. The latest, Eternal You, actually had nothing to do with shuffling cadavers — it was a lot more unsettling than that. To me at least; to others it might have offered a strange kind of hope because it explored how artificial intelligence can, with incredible sophistication, mimic a dead person by drawing on their digital history.
Bereaved loved ones may now, if they so wish, communicate with their dearly departed via text messages, or their speaking voice or even their physical avatars. It’s a profound use of AI tech, and the threshold has already been crossed.
So first ask yourself: if you had a chance to have conversations with