There's another as-yet-unexplored hazard though, and it's the emotional aspect of showing people convincing facsimiles of their loved ones.
Tempting people into making emotionally charged decisions while they're in the fragile state of confronting death is an ethical sinkhole. If people actually believe that their dead relatives have gone off to live on the great server farm in the sky, what comes next? At the very least, a profound emotional attachment to an air-conditioned warehouse filled with noisy machinery.
Alive or dead, any convincing artificial construct of a human being is going to carry a lot of weight and social currency. It's a phenomenon worthy of experimentation, but there's a very real hazard of making irrational, emotional decisions that revolve around these things, which might carry little practical benefit. There's some serious risk in being deceived by artificial creations, into behavior that is not in our own best interests.
Tempting people into making emotionally charged decisions while they're in the fragile state of confronting death is an ethical sinkhole. If people actually believe that their dead relatives have gone off to live on the great server farm in the sky, what comes next? At the very least, a profound emotional attachment to an air-conditioned warehouse filled with noisy machinery.
Alive or dead, any convincing artificial construct of a human being is going to carry a lot of weight and social currency. It's a phenomenon worthy of experimentation, but there's a very real hazard of making irrational, emotional decisions that revolve around these things, which might carry little practical benefit. There's some serious risk in being deceived by artificial creations, into behavior that is not in our own best interests.