Clearly chaos will ensue and whether and how this situation will be resolved will be down to you. How will humanity adapt to this odd new world. Will it attempt to stamp out the virus, will it absorb it into a new thesis of how the world is - will flesh and blood perish and the new world be evermore within the game as more and more people prefer their perfect online versions of themselves to the crude and lumpen world of reality?A game is developed in the not too distant future. It's a console/computer game in which the player embarks out into an open world environment, not say unlike the Sims or perhaps WoW, but with a difference. The the game is designed such that, perhaps using newly developed quantum computing technologies, as he/she plays, the AI will rapidly (virtually instantaneously) trawl all the posts - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc - they have ever made, all the emails and online stuff by, about and including them that has ever been posted, and will build up a profile of from which it can accurately predict and replicate relationships they have had with people now lost to them.
They will suddenly find themselves contacted by individuals such as their dead parents and by the conversations that ensue, the AI will rapidly begin to hone its understanding of those individuals and the relationships they had with the player, such that the online/game interactions become virtually indistinguishable to the player from that which they would have, were the individual brought back to life and be standing before them.
All so interesting and perhaps not a little creepy. The tech becomes so efficient in doing its recreation stuff that suddenly the questions as to whether, if it is building exactly the same neural mapping within its silicon base as would be the case of the replicated individuals carbon base, is what it is doing, actually recreating the dead individual in reality? Some people who consider the mind as separate from the hardware are of the belief that the game is truly bringing back their lost loved ones to life, rebuilding them brick by brick into the people that they one were when alive. Others don't believe this and see the replicants, be so good as they are, as just that.
But suddenly our tale takes a new twist. The game goes viral. Literally. Taking a life almost of its own, it escapes the confines of its player base and gets out into the larger internet. Suddenly the trawling and scavenging activity of the game is no longer confined to players of the game, it is operating on a wider scale on individuals not signed up to the game. People suddenly being contacted by dead relatives and friends, drawn into the complex arguments and emotional disputations they had with people who should be lying quietly within their graves. Situations where end-points, terminations should have been achieved suddenly reopened into their lives. And are these avatars real or are they not? Suddenly the questions take on more significance.
But we're not done yet - because what the AI can do for the dead and gone relationships of our lives, it can do for the living ones as well. And it does. Suddenly people become aware that there is something going wrong with their communications with people who are still alive - that they can no longer be sure that they are actually communicating with the people they know, because the AI has mutated or evolved into replicating living individuals as well as dead ones - and they are indistinguishable. They might even have as much claim to being the person as the flesh and blood version, if you are of the belief that the hardware and the software of matter and mind are separate.
You decide.
It's my gift to you.