The man who turned his dead father into a chatbot

Practitioners should look to the arts and other cultural resources that help people deal with loss and memorialise history. For example, a chatbot could be designed to speak as a spiritual medium channelling the deceased from a spiritual realm in order to emphasise the separation of death and impart a sense of mysticism to the imaginative experienc... See more

Maybe more people will use griefbots as the shortage of qualified mental professionals worsens. People may become more comfortable talking to computers, or poor oversight might mean that many people won’t know they are talking to a computer in the first place. So far, neither questionable ethics nor tremendous cost have prevented companies from try... See more

But in the industrialised West, communities of support are collapsing. Our spiritual institutions, practices and beliefs have been denuded by centuries of disenchantment. This may suggest that technological modernity, with its commitment to scientific rationalism, is to blame for the Western world’s often-impoverished relationship to death.

Left to themselves, these mourners chose a short-term tool to help them deal with loss. They did not want to recreate a loved one to keep them at their side for life.

When I last searched the name of a real person, a name which only came to me in missing posters and pleas for a safe return, a name which came to exist in my mind that day as a result of something very raw and real and human, I was presented some of the most clinical and fundamentally in-human writing I’ve ever read. The uncanniness and insensitivi... See more