Communicating and interacting with deceased relatives would be possible thanks to Artificial Intelligence. In any case, this is what a technological tool designed by an American doctor promises. An innovation that could have consequences for mental health and the grieving process.
It is a glaucous and unethical innovation for some, promising and comforting for others. Beneath his air of dystopian series pitch black-mirror, reviving our deceased loved ones and chatting with them post-mortem would be possible thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). More specifically, platforms using AI would be able to predict the “consciousness” and reactions of a deceased human being in order to transcribe them virtually on a screen via a “digital double” or “deadbot” (contraction of “death” and “robot” in English). In any case, this is what a american softwarefeatured in an article from the New York Post and designed by Dr. Pratik Desai, a Silicon Valley physician and computer scientist, which should be available from here the end of the year 2023. To transcribe a person’s consciousness, the tool would need a wealth of data such as recordings of the person’s voice, messages, posts or comments on social networks, video extracts and photos that we wish to “reimagine”.
An avatar that can be requested at any time, like any Facebook contact.
Compiled and mixed, all this data would then be downloaded into the AI system, which would thus learn to know and decipher the character, movements, facial expressions, language tics, sense of humor or the person’s voice. The user should then design an avatar (virtual representation of a person) resembling as much as possible the loved one he wishes to “revive”. In concrete terms, it would be possible to ask questions of the person or to have a talk with her. An avatar that can be requested at any time, like any Facebook contact in the end.
Consequences on mental health
It’s been a few years that technology and digital have been interested in funeral sector. This new branch even has a name: deathtech. Of course, what sociologists began by calling “digital eternity or immortality” would not be without consequences on mental health and could, in certain fragile people, lead to psychological excesses. “After a period of death-related shock, the next phase is to search for the deceased. We’ll think we meet her in the street, we’ll reread her messages… This phase is normal for the first year, but if it continues, she becomes pathological“, warns Véra Fakhry, a psychologist specializing in bereavement, interviewed by our colleagues from Echoesabout a similar application.
“We may have some new forms of illness around bereavement, an almost unhealthy use of these technological tools not to let the person go, new forms of depression…“, predicts Johan Rochel, specialist in innovation law and ethics, interviewed in the video report “Should we virtually resurrect our dead” from the Swiss magazine The weather. It will therefore be necessary to be extremely careful and psychologically well supported if this kind of platform arrives (one day) in France…
Sources: You could upload dead loved ones to your computer by end of year: tech guru, New York Post, April 10, 2023 / “The Place of the Dead, Issues and Rites” by sociologist Patrick Baudry (L’Harmattan, 2006)