Functional Ghosts - From Folklore Rituals to the New Afterlife

Meta has filed a patent for an AI system that trains a language model on a dead person's behavioral data and keeps their social media account running after they die. It can post, message, and simulate video calls. But this is not a new problem. Every major culture in human history developed elaborate rituals for managing the active dead, from Norse draugr to Roman Lemures to Japanese hungry ghosts to Chinese possession ceremonies. They all understood one thing - the channel has to close.
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