[pmoriarty]

Philip K Dick wrote about people going to commune with artificial personality constructs of their deceased loved ones.

Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't remember which book it was in. Maybe someone who's read him more recently can remember.

Update: Apparently, lots of other people wrote about this too, but PKD wrote about this before any of the ones mentioned so far, as he wrote about this in the 1950's or 60's. I'm not sure if he was the absolute first, however. So if anyone knows of any earlier references, it would be interesting to learn about them.

[ErikAugust]

Ubik? Though that is not about artificial personality constructs, it's about communicating with loved ones in half-dead states.

[pmoriarty]

Yes, Ubik has half-life states.

But I'm thinking of a different PKD book where there were actual artificial personality constructs instead.

[iainmerrick]

This idea crops up in a few of his novels and stories, but I think it’s most fleshed-out in Ubik, yeah.

[xkcd-sucks]

Under the hood they are all about religious Gnosticism and the physical universe as a false facade to the "true" universe. VALIS is a pretty good explication as well as a really good book; if you are into mental illness+theology, only then is his Exegesis a good read

[iainmerrick]

Very belatedly, yes, VALIS is strange and wonderful.

This is making me want to re-read some PKD!

[blancNoir]

Check out the movie with Jon Hamm, Marjorie Prime, screenplay by Jordan Harrison. Without spoiling too much, there's a company that can create holographic projections of loved ones which a woman's family gives to her as a gift which is a hologram of her deceased husband, but when he was a young man. The interesting part, narratively, is that while the holograms are near perfect physical recreations, their personalities and memories must be trained by those who knew them, family/friends which raises the question of how we're perceived in fragmentary and contradictory pieces depending on whose doing the training and the amalgamation of a person that's ultimately constructed from these parallax accounts. The writing is actually quite strong and the only scifi aspect is the holograms so I wouldn't say there's much of scifi crutch. I know it's not PKD and there are similar Black Mirror episodes, but I thought the drama itself was robust and displayed the range of Jon Hamm to be someone other than Don Draper.

[Caspy7]

This movie is available on Amazon Prime.

It's not bad, but my recommendation is to go into it with the expectation of a Black Mirror episode rather than something you might pay to see in the cinema.

[blowski]

There was also a Black Mirror episode.

[ben_w]

It’s also present in the Revelation Space series, Neuromancer, Red Dwarf, and Star Trek.

[sabalaba]

Don’t know about the Philip K Dick work but William Gibson has this in Neuromancer.