WHO CONTROLS THE RESURRECTION MACHINE?

Soon enough, artificial intelligence will allow us to construct a digital version of a dead human being. We have some decisions to make

- JACK HOLMES

ELEVEN YEARS AGO, TUPAC CAME BACK TO LIFE. SO DID Michael Jackson two years later. Okay, they still weren't breathing. But there they were, gracing the stage, digitally reincarnated as "holograms." They caused a commotion the moment they materialized. Some people who saw them thought they were pretty sweet-a nice tribute. Others got queasy. Did the shows' producers have the families' approval? Would the King of Pop even want to be resurrected as a collection of light beams? Could we really make that choice for him?

Just a decade later, you can forget about holograms. We're approaching the possibility of digital immortality.

In 2023, we have witnessed the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence in the space of a few months through the text-toimage generator DALL-E and the "large language model" ChatGPT. There's now AI in your browser with capabilities that seem to have arrived way ahead of schedule. The latest model rolled out by OpenAI, a Bay Area start-up, is called GPT-4, and it draws on a huge amount of data and machine learning to answer questions, have a conversation, even write whole essays with citations. Those citations aren't always real, however, and the information isn't always true. The model can't really assess truth or fiction. It just learns how to assemble words in a coherent way. It can construct human speech, but it isn't conscious or self-aware.