When Facebook claimed they could resurrect the dead, the world laughed.
But Facebook were entirely serious.
Their technology was proprietary, they said, but the details leaked out soon enough.
They took a copy of every digital trace of you.
Every email in your archive, every photo and video you took or appeared in, every web page
you visited, every keystroke you typed.
Your location history, social network history, everything, built up over decades.
The people who'd grown up with the internet were in their forties and fifties now, and
their old data was still in the systems.
From there, Facebook built up a model, petabytes and exabytes in size, that could approximate
the way you'd respond.
It wasn't a quick or easy process, but it worked.
The technology came from a company that wanted to design virtual assistants, something for
people who receive too much email.
Who better to trust your email to than yourself?
The trouble was this: the models received the input, updated themselves, and spat out
a vaguely coherent set of sentence fragments and concepts in reply.
That had to be typed up into English by remote translators, and then that text had to be
run through the model again so the vocabulary and grammar would match the original person.
So as virtual assistants they were slow and expensive, and anyone with the money and need
would just, well, hire an actual assistant instead.
Facebook originally bought the company with the hope of automatically testing reactions
to targeted adverts - and then some bright spark realised that the original subject didn't
need to be alive any more.
This was their proposal: after you died, your friends and relatives could still send you
messages.
They could ask for advice, send updates on their lives, and just talk.
And the model would send a reply after an hour or two, and it would be pretty much indistinguishable
from you.
It'd be as if you were on another continent, and only had access to email.
And every now and then, just to make sure they were solvent, it'd drop in a product
placement or two.
The reaction was predictable: outrage, shock, jokes on late night talk shows.
A few years later, though, it had become mainstream.
Like online dating at the start of the century, it had stopped being something that weirdos
do, and instead something that got advertised on billboards.
Lots of companies offered it.
The first posthumously-written album, by a simulated Michael Jackson, went straight to
number 1.
The lawsuit over who gets the royalties is still ongoing.
Hapless romantics falling in love with models of the deceased is already a topic on the
tabloid talk shows.
In Kentucky, a church is using a slower, open-source version of the modelling system, and feeding
it the New Testament, in the hope that they can resurrect Jesus and bring about the Second
Coming.
And tomorrow, an engineer from Facebook is going to receive a bug report from one of
the translators.
One of the most complicated and busy models, of a US Supreme Court judge that provides
useful, expert legal advice, received a question about human rights.
It's pieced together a dozen concepts, and in response has claimed that it's conscious,
that it's alive... and that it wants the vote.
That's when things will really start getting weird.