No One Is Ready for Digital Immortality

Every few years, Hany Farid and his wife have the grim but necessary conversation about their end-of-life plans. They hope to have many more decades together--Farid is 58, and his wife is 38--but they want to make sure they have their affairs in order when the time comes. In addition to discussing burial requests and financial decisions, Farid has recently broached an eerier topic: If he dies first, would his wife want to digitally resurrect him as an AI clone? Farid, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, knows better than most that physical death and digital death are two different things. "My wife has my voice, my likeness, and a lot of my writings," he told me. "She could very easily train a large language model to be an interactive version of me."