HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE

I wrote this book as one step on a long journey. 

As part of my research I found myself at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. What I discovered there changed my life.

 I saw kiosks erected on the cemetery grounds, each equipped with a screen and a keyboard. Hollywood Forever was one of the first places to offer biopics of the dead, which were then posted online.

 Family members and friends could access these from home, or visit the cemetery and watch Uncle Bob’s biopic as they gazed at his final resting place.

 I found this fascinating, but speculated that this experiment could use AI (artificial intelligence) software to create online avatars of the dead. Computer games and businesses had been using interactive avatars for years, and there was no reason why code writers could not produce online entities that looked, talked, and gestured like the dead.

 I forgot about these imaginings until 2013. I went online to find out whether anyone else had thought of making interactive avatars of the dead.

 To my astonishment I found a world of the online dead at whose existence I had never guessed. My book is the story of what I found when I journeyed into that world.

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