Dealing with death is something that everyone struggles with and with the digital aspects of life becoming more and more prevalent there are many ways folks try to keep the memory of their loved ones accessible. There are options in major social media sites to memorialize an account after the owner passes away, others use personal websites to memorialize their loved ones. With advances in technology there is now a new way to remember your loved ones, using AI and machine learning there are companies that allow you to ‘chat’ with your loved ones even after they have died. Basically these sites train a machine learning model using existing communication, emails, chats, postings etc to give you the impression that you are chatting with a dead person.
In theory this is very interesting and I like the use of technology to ease the sense of loss from a death. However, my concern is that this can quickly become a crutch and for people who are having a hard time letting go, this can make things even more complicated. In the end this is a chat-bot pretending to be a person, although to be fair the bot is explicit in telling people that it is a bot. For example when asked where they were the bot responded: “As a bot I suppose I exist somewhere on a computer server in San Francisco. And also, I suppose, in the minds of people who chat with me.”
Overall I am not sure how I feel about the tech. It is both good and creepy at the same time. Extrapolating into the future we can see that soon it would be possible to create a virtual reality (VR) representation of a person that can interact with people after the original person dies. All you would need is data and enough processing power to create a model of how a person behaves. There was a TV show that I saw a while ago where dead people lived on as online avatars and would still interact with their loved ones but I can’t remember the name but it was an interesting concept.
What do you think?
Source: Popsci.com: Old text messages are letting people chat with the dead
– Suramya