Quartz:

The best television characters have already been immortalized on screen, given reruns and our ability to stream our favorite episodes on demand. Now early research at University of Leeds is attempting to give these characters new life, by building digital recreations that can appear in new episodes or even take over for Siri on your smartphone.

Their first “immortal” character: Joey from Friends.

This is very smart and, I think, a real taste of the future. The key is to overcome the so-called uncanny valley. From Wikipedia:

The uncanny valley is the hypothesis that human replicas that appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit feelings of eeriness and revulsion among some observers.

On the dark side, once we can place actual characters in invented situations, a door will open that we can never close. You may find yourself, on video and unasked for, doing things you’ve never done. Elections will become even wilder.

All that said, this has been coming for a while now (read about the 2001 movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which promised to change everything, and really didn’t).

So take all this with a grain of salt and look forward to Joey from Friends setting your reminders. How you doin’?