WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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When Facebook claimed they could resurrect
the dead, the world laughed.

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But Facebook were entirely serious.

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Their technology was proprietary, they said,
but the details leaked out soon enough.

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They took a copy of every digital trace of
you.

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Every email in your archive, every photo and
video you took or appeared in, every web page

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you visited, every keystroke you typed.

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Your location history, social network history,
everything, built up over decades.

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The people who'd grown up with the internet
were in their forties and fifties now, and

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their old data was still in the systems.

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From there, Facebook built up a model, petabytes
and exabytes in size, that could approximate

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the way you'd respond.

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It wasn't a quick or easy process, but it
worked.

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The technology came from a company that wanted
to design virtual assistants, something for

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people who receive too much email.

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Who better to trust your email to than yourself?

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The trouble was this: the models received
the input, updated themselves, and spat out

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a vaguely coherent set of sentence fragments
and concepts in reply.

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That had to be typed up into English by remote
translators, and then that text had to be

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run through the model again so the vocabulary
and grammar would match the original person.

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So as virtual assistants they were slow and
expensive, and anyone with the money and need

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would just, well, hire an actual assistant
instead.

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Facebook originally bought the company with
the hope of automatically testing reactions

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to targeted adverts - and then some bright
spark realised that the original subject didn't

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need to be alive any more.

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This was their proposal: after you died, your
friends and relatives could still send you

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messages.

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They could ask for advice, send updates on
their lives, and just talk.

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And the model would send a reply after an
hour or two, and it would be pretty much indistinguishable

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from you.

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It'd be as if you were on another continent,
and only had access to email.

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And every now and then, just to make sure
they were solvent, it'd drop in a product

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placement or two.

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The reaction was predictable: outrage, shock,
jokes on late night talk shows.

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A few years later, though, it had become mainstream.

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Like online dating at the start of the century,
it had stopped being something that weirdos

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do, and instead something that got advertised
on billboards.

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Lots of companies offered it.

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The first posthumously-written album, by a
simulated Michael Jackson, went straight to

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number 1.

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The lawsuit over who gets the royalties is
still ongoing.

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Hapless romantics falling in love with models
of the deceased is already a topic on the

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tabloid talk shows.

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In Kentucky, a church is using a slower, open-source
version of the modelling system, and feeding

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it the New Testament, in the hope that they
can resurrect Jesus and bring about the Second

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Coming.

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And tomorrow, an engineer from Facebook is
going to receive a bug report from one of

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the translators.

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One of the most complicated and busy models,
of a US Supreme Court judge that provides

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useful, expert legal advice, received a question
about human rights.

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It's pieced together a dozen concepts, and
in response has claimed that it's conscious,

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that it's alive... and that it wants the vote.

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That's when things will really start getting
weird.