"Can AI End Grief?"

(Spoiler alert: no)

Hello! First a few quick things:

• There are a bunch of new people on the list: Welcome! You are receiving this newsletter because you have expressed interest in the past either in my work or in the work of Narrative Medicine. I hope perhaps you remain interested and I apologize in advance if you are not! (If you wish to unsubscribe right away, click “unsubscribe” at the very top of this email next to where you see my name, or at the bottom of the post.) I recently started this newsletter as a way to keep in touch with folks about my work and to create a community of people who care about creativity toward resilience and about grief work, which is becoming more and more my focus. I am currently publishing around one newsletter per month and I hope you will stick around and be a part of it!

• In the spring, I did a grief educator certificate program with David Kessler, once colleague of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. I am now “trained” to offer peer-to-peer grief support, and have decided to offer a couple of free bereavement support groups both online and in person (if the interest is there). I will likely use contemplative techniques as well as writing in these groups. If you or anyone you know might be interested, please fill out this form and I’ll be in touch with more info (still working out details/TBD depending on how many respond). Also, as I know there are lots of healthcare folks reading this, please let me know if you have ideas about how to get the word out to people who might need support (you can reply directly to this email).

• A quick note on some other new offerings: the response to the grief writing workshops has been strong and I am encouraged to offer more! Please click here to learn more about upcoming sessions.

Thank you!

And now to the post!

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An image by Janna Morton, pulled from an article in Vox titled “The Race to Optimize Grief”

Recently, my social media feed offered me an incredible video, which made me throw out all other plans for my next newsletter. The video is a reported piece from The Guardian entitled “Back from the dead: Could AI end grief?” I can’t embed the video here but I encourage you to watch it later, because it’s fascinating — my mouth was hanging open for much of my first viewing.

Perhaps many of you are already familiar with the burgeoning industry called “Grief Tech,” where technology is put to use to try to help people through loss. There is a whole world to explore in this area — from augmented virtual reality , to cloning (!), to AI “ghostbots,” to digital estate planning and online legacy “afterlife,” and more — and much writing has already been done. For our purposes here, though, I’ll stick to this one video, as it offers plenty to think about.

The reporter, Richard Sprenger, who says up front that he is “fascinated and repelled” by grief tech, interviews Justin Harrison, who has started a company called “You, Only Virtual,” which creates virtual personas that can “live” on after a person dies. Justin’s journey, we learn, began with the death of his mother; he tells Sprenger that he has had his mother cryogenically frozen, so that in the future he’ll be able to “pull her memories” from the “hard-drive that is her body.” Nevermind the real feasibility of this — it seems unlikely to me that memories will ever really be retrievable from a dead person, even in a future where a body can be reanimated (do we even know, definitively, how memories are stored? We don’t even know what causes consciousness! A memory is not a thing, so how could it be pulled from another’s mind?) — Harrison clearly believes. He says: “My goal has always remained…I want to continue to have conversations with my mother.” He wondered, when she was sick and he knew she would die, “how can I save her life in a different way?”

It’s the semantics that fascinate me most throughout all of this, I think — “save her life,” “continue to have conversations” — to me, these are not possibilities. Yes maybe you can make a virtual version of your mother with which you can have conversations; yes maybe you can trap elements of her that then “live” in a software program — but you are not “saving her life,” and you are not having conversations with her, because she is dead.

“For me,” Harrison says, “the absolute core of grief is the concept of ‘gone forever.’ That’s the tragedy of death, the permanence of it. What I would like to see is the complete and total eradication of grief, the feeling…that comes with losing people.” Harrison seems to believe that such a complete eradication can come about if only everyone were to have access to virtual versions of their lost people — one version of them has died, but another lives on, so there is no loss.

Is it only because I am not really a computer person that this sounds delusional to me? From where I sit, eliminating grief is an impossibility, no matter how far the technology advances. Even if I could clone my mother, my father, my brother, fill them with the most full version of their digital essence…it would never, could never truly be them, because they were human, and now they are gone. This seems to me an incontrovertible fact. It also seems a fact that grief is part of what makes us human, and to “eradicate” may not really be a good thing.

Sprenger goes to talk to a shamanic medium, who channels the dead for her clients, to ask her if “grief tech” feels like competition for her. She says no, and says “really, when I’m trans-channeling a loved one that’s a form of grief tech,” an interesting point. But then she speaks about how her work is done in community, with other living beings. “To me,” she says, with technology “we’re creating a tank of isolation. A part of me wonders if the people so adamant in pushing this technology forward, and I say this with love, are in deep pain themselves.” This feels right. Hearing Harrison say how deeply he wants to “eradicate” grief, it is impossible not to feel how deeply he must be experiencing it.

Sprenger tries to broach the idea of isolation with Harrison, who mostly brushes it off, speaking about how his online communities put him in touch with more people than “someone my age 20-30 years ago.” Sprenger points out that they are the same age, and that their mothers both died in the same year. Isn’t grief, asks Sprenger, “just a manifestation of love, difficult but vital for processing something that happened?” Again Harrison’s response is fascinating. He speaks of the good that has come out of human suffering, mainly referencing great works of art. “For the heroes like yourself that are willing to experience misery to make our life a little bit more colorful I say bravo, sir — I will remain amongst the cowards who don’t need to be any more dynamic and well-rounded and interesting and can just be in my happy bubble, you know?”

Reading between the lines here (I know I’m psychoanalyzing, which is not necessarily fair) it feels like there is almost an acknowledgement that what Harrison is after is a fiction. To be in a “happy bubble” is necessarily to be shutting out the unhappy things, to be living in a kind of dream, no? If this is the case, then it’s not really an “eradication of grief,” is it, so much as a fictional delusion one enters into where grief doesn’t exist?

Sprenger goes to see a family in Pennsylvania who is using Harrison’s technology — a couple with three young children. The father created an AI version of his wife soon after she had a stroke and was told that she likely only had a few years to live. Not too long after that, he was diagnosed with cancer, so they made a version of him as well, which they refer to, with their kids, as “Robodad.” It’s interesting to me that Sprenger chose a family who is using the tech despite both of them being alive — I wonder why this decision was made. The dad speaks tearfully about how he created his wife’s avatar because he couldn’t bear to think about being without her. He asks his son, maybe around 7, how he would feel if he, the father, was not there, but Robodad still was. The boy says, “I would be happy because I would still have a little piece of you in that computer,” and then he starts to cry and asks if he can go to his room. The father says, “he hasn’t unpacked it” — of course he hasn’t! To ask a boy that age to grapple with death is hard enough, but it seems to me that to ask him to tease out this question of technology while his father is alive is a whole other difficult thing. Then the father says, “I know people could use this as a crutch…as long as you understand that, there are beautiful things that could happen with it.” Fair enough.

The still from the video as it sits on The Guardian page, showing the PA father with his son

In the last scene, Sprenger comes back to Harrison, who speaks again about his mother. “It gives me hope,” he says, “to know that every six months, every year I can have more extended conversations, and eventually can sit in a room as you and I are sitting here and talk with my mom. Twenty years from now we can put this program times a million into a robot and I can give my mom a hug, she can meet my kids, their kids…”

Again, the syntax here is so wild. To not make a distinction between his true human mother and the virtual one, to say that in fact the technology will evolve so that he is actually talking with his mom, and hugging her … his pain seems very on display to me. Would it change everything for me if he said “eventually I’ll be able to sit in a room with a simulated version of my mom”? I think so, yes. To not say it that way seems to reveal the impossibility of the dream.

“I think,” says Harrison at the end of the video, “as we become more understanding of the human brain and psyche, we are going to push the boundaries of what being dead means.” An amazing sentence. Again I think: no. Being dead will always mean being dead. Even if you load up a program with your mother’s voice, her text messages, her stories, even if a virtual version of her “lives,” in any form, she will still be dead.

I don’t mean to say that this technology is worth nothing, or can’t or won’t provide comfort to people in their grief. I concede that, like the PA father said, “beautiful things” can likely happen as people interact with these simulations of the people they loved and lost. That’s another newsletter perhaps. But the end of grief? No. An impossibility. And maybe, perhaps, even more beautiful things can be made if we acknowledge this to be true.