I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular. Maybe some extremists will think its unholy and some addicts will lose sense of reality, but for the vast majority of people, I think it's just a user interface - maybe to some particular piece of information in the chatbot-as-librarian role, or puzzle boxes that eventually reveal information once you ask the right question, like Will Smith in I Robot.

What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind !

I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!

> Maybe some extremists will think its unholy

At the other side of this equation is the extremists that think this is great. To go full Godwin's law there are certainly people out there that would like for a digital Hitler to stick around forever.

I'm sure people will create holographic Hitlers for historical reasons too.

> I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular.

I think it will end up just being boring. The sad reality is that no one really wants to talk to us, except for a few who are amazing poets or something.

I think what’s more likely is to train models on all material created and ask useful questions for purposes of probate (“when did you buy the house”) because its faster and cheaper than manual research. Or maybe for family history summaries (“how many cousins lived in Colorado in the 1990s and moved to Iowa?”)

People have a strong need to feel connected to others. Many feel particularly strong about their ancestors, or perhaps more distant family or people that were there in particular moments in life. I can definitely see a possibility that people talking to AI emulations of their grandma/godfather/mentor/etc from time to time (after that person is dead). It will of course depend on how culture evolves, maybe it has little place in a hyperinvidualistic world view.

> Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet?

You get that this only played out positively in the movie because the writers/director wanted it to play out that way, right?

In the Smallville TV show, the Jor-El AI was shown to have its own agenda, which at times was very much at odds with not-yet-Superman's goals and view points.

Yeah but clark never met his father it was meant to for information transfer. He was not using it as a crutch to avoid dealing with the mental health aspects of his fathers death.

Also as others have pointed out it suffers from the hollywood positive-ification of things and never attmempts to take on any serious aspects of the tech. Its just a plot device.

We can speculate that this was not a mainstream thing in Kryptonian society. Then again, their society was on the verge of collapse when the Els committed the heresy of conceiving a "general purpose" child in a society where bloodlines were bred for particular roles in society. Creating a life-like AI resemblance subject to the same restrictions as Jor-El himself seems almost "normal" in comparison.

Perfect for a generation ship, if we ever send one out. The people on the ship can ask their ancestors what on earth (lol) they're doing there.