Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve.
Technology, which lets you “talk” to people who’ve died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. It’s an idea that’s been peddled by charlatans and spiritualists for centuries. But now it’s becoming a reality—and an increasingly accessible one, thanks to advances in AI and voice technology. If we can have conversations with deceased, this really will make it easier to keep close the people we love. It’s not hard to see the appeal. People might turn to digital replicas for comfort, or to mark special milestones like anniversaries.
For some, this tech may even be alarming, or downright creepy. Imagine speaking to virtual version of your mother, which you can boot up and talk to at her own funeral. Some people argue that conversing with digital versions of lost loved ones could prolong your grief or loosen your grip on reality.
Is it wrong to try?
There’s something deeply human about the desire to remember the people we love who’ve passed away. We urge our loved ones to write down their memories before it’s too late. After they’re gone, we put up their photos on our walls. We visit their graves on their birthdays. We speak to them as if they were there. But the conversation has always been one-way.
The idea that technology might be able to change the situation has been widely explored in ultra-dark sci-fi shows like Black Mirror—which, startups in this sector complain, everyone inevitably brings up. In one 2013 episode, a woman who loses her partner re-creates a digital version of him—initially as a chatbot, then as an almost totally convincing voice assistant, and eventually as a physical robot. Even as she builds more expansive versions of him, she becomes frustrated and disillusioned by the gaps between her memory of her partner and the shonky, flawed reality of the technology used to simulate him.
If technology might help me hang onto the people I love, is it so wrong to try?
Becoming sentient
The technology has evolved even in the past several years to a somewhat startling degree. Rapid advances in AI have driven progress across multiple areas. Chatbots and voice assistants, like Siri and Alexa, have gone from high-tech novelties to a part of daily life for millions of people over the past decade. We have become very comfortable with the idea of talking to our devices about everything from the weather forecast to the meaning of life. Now, AI large language models (LLMs), which can ingest a few “prompt” sentences and spit out convincing text in response, promise to unlock even more powerful ways for humans to communicate with machines. LLMs have become so convincing that some (erroneously) have argued that they must be sentient.