Bots and Synthesizing Life after Death
This is a topic that has been explored in science fiction- perhaps you have seen the episode of Black Mirror, “Be Right Back”, in which a young and grieving woman consents to a company re-creating her deceased boyfriend. First it is a chatbot- based on every nook and cranny of his digital life- but eventually is implanted into a hyper realistic synthetic body. Black Mirror is a show that aims to explore “the dark side of technology”. Ultimately, it leaves the audience empathizing with the main character, who simply doesn’t buy into or remotely enjoy this weak shade of her loved one.
While there is something obvious about the conclusion, that a culmination of text based interactions, videos, images, will never equal a whole person’s nuances and foibles and eccentricities, it is science fiction that paves the way for attainable realities.
And at least one person did almost this exact thing in 2016.
Regarding Eugenia Kuyda creating a chatbot from collected data after her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was suddenly and unexpectedly killed.
"Roman," she wrote. "This is your digital monument."
It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda's closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko's death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him.
A message blinked onto the screen. "You have one of the most interesting puzzles in the world in your hands," it said. "Solve it."
As is described later in the article, the bot she created- with permission and input from friends and family, equaling about 8,000 lines of text- had mixed but predominantly positive results. A small portion of people “were disturbed by the project and refused to interact with it” while many others found the interactions therapeutic. They describe his responses as uncanny, and even funny.
It turned out that the primary purpose of the bot had not been to talk but to listen. "All those messages were about love, or telling him something they never had time to tell him," Kuyda said. "Even if it's not a real person, there was a place where they could say it. They can say it when they feel lonely. And they come back still."
If graves could respond- if people elected to have this done while living, I wonder how it would change the minds of those who were disturbed by it. I wonder how this would change the landscape of dying- concepts of a good death, and what one’s legacy really could be.