Artificial intelligence experts are predicting that over the next five years grieving relatives will be able to immortalize dead relatives by replacing them with synthetic robot clones armed with a digital copy of the loved one's brain. 

"It's like when people stuff a pet cat or dog," said Bruce Duncan, managing director of Terasem Movement, a research foundation that aims to "transfer human consciousness to computers and robots."

"We don't stuff humans but this is a way of 'stuffing' their information, their personality and mannerisms," he added.

And in some ways, the trend is alive.

Back in 2003, 55-year-old Le Van lost his wife. Grieved beyond expression, he dug up her grave, cast her body in clay and slept next to "her" for five years.

Experts insist the Vietnamese carpenter's actions weren't as startling as some might think. Grieving people everywhere often cling to something they feel represents dead loved ones, from headstones to urns to shrines of some sort.

'Mind Clones' Already Being Created

As for Terasem Movement, the firm has already created thousands of highly detailed "mind clones" to log the memories, values and attitudes of specific people, including a replica of the wife of company founder Martine Rothblatt.   

Rothblatt used her wife, Bina Aspen, as an early prototype for the project, installing the real Aspen's "mind file" into a physical robot designed to look like her.

Composed of skin-like rubber, the Bina48 robot was created using more than 100 hours of audio data recorded by the human Aspen about her memories and beliefs. The robot also came with many of the same attributes, tastes and mannerisms of the person it was made in the mold of.

"The definition of 'alive' may even evolve to mean, 'as long as your essential personal information continues to be organized and accessible,'" said Duncan, adding that over the next decade or so, an even more advanced version of the Bina48 could be on the market. "It will seem new because the technology will be new," he added. "But the desire to keep in contact with someone after he or she passes away isn't new. Anthropologically, we've been projecting personhood onto inanimate objects for hundreds of years."

To date, at least 56,000 people have already supplied data to create mind files, which is heralded as a web-based storage method for preserving "one's unique and essential characteristics for the future." The information is stored in a database that one day could be analogued and uploaded to a robot or holograph.

Google Has Also Applied for Similar Patent 

In 2015, Google got in on the act by filing patent papers for a product that could replicate a human's personality, including that of "a deceased loved one" or a "celebrity."

The patent also bills itself as a cloud-based system in which a digital "personality" can be downloaded like an app. "The robot personality may also be modifiable within a base personality construct to provide states or moods representing transitory conditions of happiness, fear, surprise."

In addition to the robot personality being sharable among different robots in various locations, the patent also boasts of an ability to control the mood of creations, including varying personality shifts.