Digital Reanimation

In 1984, William Gibson imagined a dead hacker named McCoy Pauley—the Dixie Flatline—whose personality had been preserved on a ROM construct and could be plugged in and run on demand. The Flatline speaks and reasons in the voice of a man who has died. He knows he is not alive. At one point he asks to be erased when the job is done, because his condition—a personality without a person, a voice running long after the body that generated it is gone—is unbearable to him. Forty years later, companies offer to preserve the deceased as chatbots trained on their messages and recordings; researchers reconstruct historical figures as interactive systems; grieving families train language models on the texts of those they have lost. The technology Gibson imagined is being built, and the moral question he embedded in the Flatline’s plea for erasure—whether the preservation of a voice is a gift or a violation—has