I'm already assuming we will see a creepy AI service emerge that will take the contents of a recently deceased person's cellphone and let you carry on texting them as if they were still alive, if it hasn't already (I haven't seen one yet).

For many of us a cellphone has incredibly detailed records of who we were and how we spoke, going back decades now. I have already left a note in my will instructing that all my compute devices be destroyed, regardless of AI I simply don't want my private thoughts and records to pass to my kids.

I inherited my mother's cellphones and iPads recently, mainly because no-one knew what to do with them, along with the passcodes. I'd much rather remember her the way I do now than have her private messages color my perception of her, and destroyed them immediately.

It was one of the first things to be done with GPT-3: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/14...

The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades.

Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars of the reconstruction and traded as assets between cyber-interrogation firms. If you did a good job of erasing yourself, the reconstruction will be subprime. The hyper-documented such as Bryan Johnson, Donald Trump and Christine Chandler will be given AAA-ratings by the company descended from the Neuralink-Moody's merger.

The billions of shoddy photocopies of the dead will be endlessly vivisected and reassembled on a loop, along with the living, until all capacity for economic value has been wrung out of them. The only way this may not happen is if a theory for navigating and doing calculus on the phase space of all possible human minds is constructed quickly enough to make enslaved zombies as obsolete a technology to the future society as DirectX is to us.