Science fiction idea

[jwgh]

I should go to bed, but.

A week or so ago I was listening to This American Life, and specifically the "Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Milestones" episode, and there was a little discussion of funeral technology.

The idea was that the last real innovation in funeral technology, when embalming made open-casket funerals possible, so people could actually see the deceased in some semblance of what he or she looked like when alive. The story was about a funeral home (or chain of funeral homes, I don't quite remember) that are trying to go the next step: people make videos of the deceased, possibly including video clips but also maybe just the equivalent of a slideshow, with narration to talk about the deceased's life and what was appearing on the screen, and music to set or reinforce the mood. I think in many cases these videos are put together by the people themselves before they die, although in some cases they might be put together after their deaths.

As you'd expect, these videos tend towards the trite; a lot of people use the same music, the focus is always on the positive in the deceased's life, etc. But attendees to the funeral invariably find it incredibly touching, and people often openly weep during the presentation.

The family gets a copy of the video, but I seem to recall that they also keep a copy at the cemetery, so that those who wish to pay their respects can also see it.

Well, this got me to thinking. Suppose that this does catch on, and in fifty or a hundred years practically everyone is doing this. What would the next big technological leap be?

I figure it would be some sort of simulator, so you could have the illusion of actually talking to the person. It would probably be pretty crude at first, sort of like the robots in Starship Titanic, and maybe there would be some set sentences or phrases that the people recorded in advance to respond to specific questions. As technology advanced, appropriate replies to more and more varied questions would be possible and more precise replicas would be possible.

Except you don't really want a 100% precise reproduction of your personality to greet people after you die. Currently the ultimate tribute to a mortician is to say He never looked better in his life. Similarly, the person portrayed in the videos at the funeral home mentioned above isn't shown having temper tantrums or being thoughtless or callous; you want people to remember you as being a great guy or gal!

So I see people saying to their cybermorticians, That's great, it's just like me, but could you make it a little more ... I don't know ... nicer? Or smarter? More tactful? I don't want my replica screaming at anyone, so could you get it to control its temper a little better? You name it.

And this will be successful! So soon you'll have a situation where you can go and ask your deceased father for advice -- but the advice he gives will be better, more loving, more understanding! People will swarm to the cemeteries! A great new era of enlightened leadership will come to being!

I have no idea what to do with this, but if someone else does, feel free.

Comments

[fabio-heinz.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that if your idea of producing cyberpeople who are BETTER than real people comes to be a reality, the next logical step is to KILL ALL THE INFERIOR REAL PEOPLE, WHICH IS JUST WHAT I'D EXPECT FROM A COMMIE LIKE YOU! COMMIE!!

COMMIE!! C O M M I E!!1! BURN THE COMMUNIST! BEFORE HE BuRNS US!!!!!!!1!1!!

[jwgh]

I think that only happens if you say to the funeral director, Can you make it a little smarter and a little nicer and a LOT MORE LIKELY TO CONQUER THE WORLD, SPILLING THE BLOOD OF ITS ENEMIES AND DRIVING THEM BEFORE IT AND PURGING THE WORLD OF THE FILTH THAT IS HUMANITY? And funeral home directories would probably have some kind of code of ethics that would prevent them from acceding to such requests.

I think this sort of thing can only come about if the living dead decide that, really, it's for our own good.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Something like this showed up in an episode of Max Headroom. In that story it was actually a scam; the simulators were claimed to be Max Headroom-like uploads of the deceased to digital retirement, when anyone not grieving and somewhat gullible could tell that they weren't. The simulators kept saying "It's... wonderful... isn't it???" in a blissed-out tone of voice.

There's also an affecting short story by Alexander Jablokov called "Living Will" in which a man suffering from some degenerative disease (Alzheimer's, possibly) creates a simulation of himself to walk him through his eventual suicide.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Let's not be naive here. Humans are crass and greedy and cruel. It'll be all horrible. Funeral directors will be supposedly bound by a code of ethics, but some will be easily bribable. Some relative (say, a son that didn't get his inheritance because instead it went to the Anna Nicole-like bimbo wife who was married to the now-deceased for about five seconds) will bribe the funeral director to make sure the simulacrum is as crass and horrible as possible, running around naked to great visitors, shouting obscenities, cursing the living in specific terms, etc. Hahahahaha. I am EVIL.

Either that or it would be more like Ed and his Dead Mother.

I just read something like this

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

in either Hartwell's or Silverberg and Haber's 2002 collection, actually. Except it wasn't for funereal or memorial purposes. It was an extension of legal definitions of personhood, and the story was all about the blurring of lines between people and computers and corporations, and between hardware and software. The story started out with a guy's eyeglass-computer being stolen and his not being able to remember even who he was without it, and wound up with a collective of people who would alternately or even simultaneously be "running Bob" on their wetware, Bob being a deceased supergenius whose imperfectly saved personality was trying to achieve legal status.

Stretching the definition of humanity was a common theme in both collections last year. Both included Robert Reed's "Coelocanths," about human evolution into additional physical dimensions. There was a comic story about collectives of incompetents that are functionally equivalent to one fully functioning human, and there was a very pretty low-tech story that I don't remember much of about people made up of anywhere from 4 to 16 independent bodies and minds.

Re: I just read something like this

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was a wild story a few years back in one of the Dozois anthologies called "The Wedding Album" in which AI partial duplicates of people were created to be recordings of themselves at the moment of their wedding. The wedding-album people see vast chunks of history play out in little slices as they're temporarily reactivated for viewing, and the story gets very strange from there on.

[(Anonymous)]

I vaguely remember a story in which the personality simulators built into adjacent tombstones chat with each other to pass the time between living visitors.

-ranjit

Are you sure that was SF?

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Dostoevsky's "Bobok" to me.