"You know, you should really do XYZ..." (whatever the agenda is)
Pretty dystopian.:(
I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was at least interesting to some, GPT of course can do a lot better. Imagine we had actual superintelligent AI working on this, which actually tried to recreate brain models, or even restore a sense of existence to the resurrection that can continue independently and to their own delight rather than just being some static VR experience turned on and off whenever. (I jotted some thoughts a few years ago... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_o...)
I'm in agreement though at least for now that even if you dialed up the fidelity to the point I can't point to anything objectively "off", let alone went with a low fidelity VR thing or just a chat bot, I'd still always think in the back of my mind that this isn't really the same person. Nevertheless, it could still be comforting to some, and interesting to others, and so if it's at all possible for potential future humans/ems/aligned AIs to work at it, they will.
Curiously I don't have the same back of the mind feeling at all when considering the idea of someone preserved with cryonics and then brought back as an em, the person would be the same to me, even if there was a bit of damage from the vitrification process that was error-corrected. I have a disagreement with a friend on that point, who thinks it would be something similar but not the same. Anyway, I think this is due to just having a much higher fidelity "source of truth" to work from that is the preserved adult brain, whereas someone supposedly information-theoretically dead requires a lot more guess-work, perhaps truly impossibly too much more even for a superintelligence, to bring back convincingly.
Will the simulacrum age? Will it change? Will it ever surprise me or intrigue me? And if it does, is it something the dead person truly would have done?
It's sort of like a photograph; a photograph seems to capture reality but all it shows is some abstraction of a physical reality at one point in time. The photograph tells me nothing about the current reality of anything depicted within.
A simulacrum gives me the person I knew, when they died, and that's it. Perhaps comforting and interesting, but ultimately unfulfilling and unsettling I would imagine.
Maybe that's fine for some people. To me there's a line where it crosses over into offense. In no way do I think the status quo of my mental well-being is so important that I'd replace someone with a digital robot facsimile.
For less convincing avatars where the point is just my own benefit of conversing with something like them when I want, from slightly like them to eerily like them, for one it's a weak yes, for the others I'm more indifferent -- it'd be more in the realm of curiosity than desire, like talking to a historical figure or a fictional character. The weak yes I expect will get weaker (as it already has, despite non-linear flare-ups/resurgences where it's temporarily stronger) and eventually match the others after long enough.
Relevant Asimov story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
Reading about The Dead Past tho, there's a good deal of overlap with the plot device of "Devs", a periscope into deep history, but which Nick Offerman's character uses to re-live moments of his daughter's short life, as Asimov's protagonist does.
I for one have many things I wish I had said to my parents before they died. I’d like to use it, but not be obsessed or consumed by it.
Once a person dies, they're gone. The world is different, and nothing will bring them back. Spending time with a simulacrum isn't really spending time with a loved one.