Eternal You

AI’s attempt to reanimate the dead

Eternal You is a new documentary charting attempts by tech companies to create chatbots and digital avatars of deceased loved ones. It’s creepy and unnerving and a great example of how technological culture threatens to drain our lives of meaning.

The most disturbing story in the film involves a woman who appears on a Korean TV show to meet the avatar of her daughter, who tragically died aged seven. The sight of the weeping mother wearing a virtual reality headset and glove desperately reaching for her emoting “daughter” is heartbreaking. We can see what she can’t. There is nothing there.

Death, that ever present mystery, once gave our lives direction and fueled a sense of awe. We now see it as just another problem to be fixed, and a way of making a quick fortune from those suffering from incurable loss.

And so the sadness in watching this film is felt on several levels. We feel for the bereaved, not just for their loss but because they are being exploited at a vulnerable time by those more eager to play God than think abut the consequences. And we feel for the deceased, whose memory is reduced to a patchwork of data, now under the control of commercial interests.

We also worry about a civilization bent on pushing technology into domains central to our humanity without any proper thought about how that humanity might be impacted or reference to the philosophies or faith traditions that have shaped it. For these traditions, death is not only an inevitable part of life but an engagement with the sacred.

One case in point is the Hebrew Bible, which contains complex rituals around death and mourning, yet seeks to maintain a hard border between the living and the dead. The Bible specifically prohibits conversing with the dead or rituals referred to as Ov (necromancy) and Yidoni (sorcery).¹

Maimonides (1138-1204), the great philosopher and legalist, explains the general prohibition as covering  anyone who performs an act aimed at communicating with the dead, such as sleeping in a cemetery with this purpose in mind.²

Maimonides further explains, based on the Talmud, that Ov is performed by burning incense, waiving a myrtle branch, and reciting an incantation until a voice appears to emerge from the ground or using a skull to elicit a sound, while Yidoni involves providing an oracle by taking a bone of an animal or a bird and placing it in one’s mouth.³

According to the Talmud⁴, King Saul made illicit use of Ov when he called up the prophet Samuel from the dead to get his advice on his battle with the Philistines.⁵

Commentators were in no doubt that necromancy or sorcery have no basis in reality. They work only at the psychological level, but this is still enough to put them off limits.

Psychology might also explain the Hebrew Bible’s separation between life and death, and apparent lack of interest in an afterlife. The ancients died, were buried and mourned, and then (for the most part) left alone. The deceased in turn left their descendants alone to make their own decisions and mistakes without interference from them. The ancestors then are to be respected and revered, but not worshipped, consulted, or disturbed, which might explain why, as the Bible records, the location of Moses’ grave remains a secret.⁶

What this signifies to me is that each generation needs a new voice. The problem with necromancy and sorcery is that they are backward looking or avoid the responsibility needed to take tough decisions- to move forward. This is the precise difficulty of the newly bereaved.

The desperate refusal to let go in the face of death is well captured in a prescient 2013 episode of Black Mirror entitled “Be Right Back” (Series 2, Episode 1), which presents a stark portrayal of the psychological confusion and damage we are capable of inflicting when it comes to grief bots.

In it, Martha, who just lost her lover in a car accident, is told by Sarah, her friend, about a “new service” that lets people stay in touch with the deceased. Martha uses the service (basically a chatbot) to reunite her with her lost lover, who soon tells Martha about a “next level” of communicating, which will bring them even closer. She bites. The episode doesn’t end comfortably, but I won’t spoil it for you.

A death of a loved one stops everything in its tracks. AI might provide a temporary therapeutic assist to those left behind to move beyond their loss, one tiny step at a time. But the precise parameters, psychological costs and benefits, social impact, philosophical implications, as well as the ethics and law covering issues such as ownership and use of data after one’s death, all need to be carefully weighed and debated.

1. Deuteronomy 18:10.

2. MT, Avodah Zarah 11:13.

3. MT, Avodah Zara 6:1-2.

4. TB Sanhedrin 65b.

5. I Samuel, Chapter 28.

6. See Chizkuni on Deuteronomy 34:6.