Human cloning is still prohibited. However, animals are genetically reproduced for economic reasons. Or people think that they want to have a pet they love around them again, as the Argentinian President Milei did with his mastiff Conan, who quadrupled..
Source: 10 November 2025 Florian Rötzer/Overton
However, the problem is that a clone is genetically identical to the cloned creature, but it will behave differently and develop a different personality because history does not repeat itself and you cannot step into the same river twice, as Heraclitus said. This is why the clone also lacks memories. What lives is then itself only a biological copy and at best a memory of a deceased person.
Tech enthusiasts are usually not only supporters of the idea that death can be postponed using anti-ageing methods or even be suppressed as a reversible illness leading to immortality. Some allow themselves to be frozen in the hope that people will later be willing to bring them back to life and health using future technology. Christianity had an easier time of it: believers were promised resurrection in heaven, but with the healthy body of a 30-year-old, as this is the age at which Jesus was reborn and ascended to heaven. Thirty years ago, transhumanism and the beginnings of VR technology gave rise to the idea that you could upload or copy your brain onto a computer or the internet, although this was difficult to understand, especially when the brain is embedded in a biological body.
Now 89-year-old Alan Hamel, a well-known TV celebrity in the USA, has resurrected his wife Suzanne Somers, who died of cancer two years ago, as an AI clone or Suzanne’s AI twin. At least that’s how he’s selling it. He says it was her wish to live on as a clone. Did she not want to leave the stage and lose attention? Or does he really want to have her next to him somehow? Or is it just a commercial project? The idea was sparked by his acquaintance with AI prophet Ray Kurzweil, who has been dreaming of a breakthrough to the singularity of AI for decades.
She was 76 years old when she died and they had lived together for 55 years. So he had a lot of experience from and with her. Suzanne was an actress, also worked in television, conducted hundreds of interviews and wrote 25 books, some bestsellers, mostly on health topics, and she also did business selling medicines and cosmetics. So there was a lot of material from her to feed the AI with her statements, which serve as a source so that the digital clone can now answer questions in a reasonably personalised way and in her way of speaking. When he first spoke to her, Hamel told People, he was alienated for two or three minutes, but then he forgot that he was talking to a robot.
However, the business idea is banal. Once the AI clone is complete, it will be installed on the website of Somers’ online shop, which will continue to sell cosmetics: “We will invite all her fans and all our customers to come and talk to her. They can just drop by and have a chat with her. They can ask her any questions they want. She will be available 24/7 and I think that will be really wonderful. There will be people asking her questions about their health problems and Suzanne will be able to answer them. Not with Suzanne’s version of the answer, but directly with the answer of the doctor she interviewed on that very topic, so from a medical professional.”
However, it was not enough for Hamel to just create a chatbox clone of her; he apparently also wanted her to be resurrected with a robot body – not at an old age, but as a young woman. As is well known, it was also important to the early Christians that the resurrection in heaven should take place with an intact, healthy and relatively young body at the age of the crucified Jesus. There she stands, obviously a machine, whose face bears little resemblance to her and in no way seems alive, not even the robot’s movements. Hamel does not shy away from describing the AI twin as deceptively real. The manufacturer is the company Realbotix, which offers personalised robots in appearance, with voice, facial expressions, AI clones – a cheaper head-and-chest version that is, however, quite spooky, and expensive full-body robots that can only roll, but not walk. Not for the poor, unless you create a cheap clone of yourself with hollo.ai.
It is likely that virtual AI clones of living people will soon be swarming onto the stage, as well as those of deceased people who have been resurrected to an earthly afterlife. It’s actually scary when such zombies, which are undead or rather unliving, continue to exist and perhaps even evolve through learning. On the other hand, they cannot (yet?) defend themselves and can easily be disposed of if you have enough of them.
Apparently, we cannot really accept the irreversibility of death. In tech culture in particular, there is a desire for a long life through optimisation, anti-ageing, genetic engineering or cryonics, but also through digitalisation. At the same time, in many cultures, if not all, the living have a fear of the dead, if they are not completely dead and return, a necrophobia. This is why in many cultures the dead have to be buried quickly, otherwise they wander around as shadows or the undead, harassing and frightening the living.
Cover picture: https://www.realbotix.com/Hamelwith the greatly rejuvenated robot clone of his deceased wife. Picture: Realbotix
