A Future Without Goodbyes? Hanging Out with the Virtual Dead

On February 9 this year, I was thinking about my father. It had been exactly five years since he died, and as I hadn’t heard his voice in a long time, I thought this anniversary might be a good opportunity to rummage through some old voicemails.

Many were of the standard “haven’t heard from you in awhile; give me a call” variety, but a few were more substantial. I smiled when I heard him laugh at some goofy joke he made, I felt guilty when he asked me to do something I distinctly remember not doing, and I just generally missed him and the relationship we had. Most importantly, at the end of it all, I had an overwhelming sense of appreciation for both the 37 years we overlapped in life, and the chance I had that night to remember him.

The next morning, my cousin sent me an article about a Korean TV special called Meeting You, in which virtual reality is used to “reunite” a mother with her somewhat recently deceased 7-year-old daughter.

The technology that makes this all possible is unquestionably impressive, but the video is hard to watch. The editing and background music are played up at times for sentimental impact, but seeing this woman cry into a VR mask while desperately pawing (with “touch-sensitive gloves”) at a computerised ghost is unsettling with or without the editorial/musical garnish. I imagine it’s the stuff of some people’s nightmares.

It certainly doesn’t help to hear the “daughter” ask where the mother has been and if she still thinks about her. Eventually, the trimmed down version of the experience presented to viewers at home settles down emotionally, as mother and “daughter” have a small birthday celebration in a virtual playground. In the final scene, they exchange goodbyes at bedtime before the little girl transforms into a luminescent butterfly and flutters away.

What struck me about all this, besides immediate empathy for a fellow human being in obvious emotional distress, was how different my experience of remembering my dad while listening to old voicemails had been from the way this grieving mother seemed to experience her time with her virtual daughter.

At this point I need to mention a number of very important caveats, beginning with the fact that I have no access to the ultimate psychological impact of this woman’s experience. The purpose of the televised exercise seems to have been to help a bereaved mother “move on”, which is not really something I need help with at this stage; perhaps she found the help she needed, despite what looked to me like a traumatic encounter. Furthermore, there are cultural differences, and differences in age (of the deceased) and gender that must be considered. It also matters that while I lost a parent, this woman lost a child.


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Given these extremely salient differences, I hope it’s clear that I don’t mean to criticise this woman’s reaction to seeing her daughter digitally recreated (even though I share the qualms of the author of the article about televising the experience and making it available online).

Having acknowledged these issues, the contrast between my experience and hers still reminded me of a paper I wrote not long before my father’s passing. In this paper, I speak about certain moral implications of advancing technologies related to the way we interact with the dead. I use the term ‘Interactive Personality Constructs’ (IPCs) to designate the kind of digital approximation of the daughter described above, and I suggest that through a combination of audiovisual recording, voice recognition, motion capture technology, and sophisticated enough processing power such things might not be so far off.

Of course, the “daughter” in this case may not be as interactive as the show is sometimes edited to make her appear, and she may not make it all the way across the “uncanny valley”, but it certainly looks like another technological step toward IPCs has been taken.

My contention is that this may not be an entirely desirable development. The difference between listening to old voicemails, and the kind of interaction with the dead that may soon be possible and widely available through VR and other interfaces is a big one. I’ve explained this difference in terms of “recollection vs. replacement”. Whereas older technologies (including everything from painting and the written word to video recordings) make it easier to recollect elements of the deceased, IPCs seem largely aimed in the direction of replacing them.

I won’t deny that the line between recollection and replacement in this context is sometimes a little blurry, but my concern is that the former focuses on the dead themselves and the relationship you had with them, while the latter is more about what you’ve lost and how you can mitigate that loss. A replacement-based approach to dealing with a death makes it harder to fulfill long-standing, commonly accepted obligations to deceased loved ones. Furthermore, a world in which we can, in great detail, recreate and replace the experience of interacting with a person might be alienating for that person as death approaches.

Maybe we’re supposed to have a hole in our hearts and our lives when someone we care about exits the world. And maybe your own dying would hurt even more if no one else had much reason to be upset about it because they can just hang out with digital “you” once you are gone. The admittedly speculative situation described here puts a rather large burden on the dying, and not much on the survivors, which seems like a new and shockingly unfair imbalance.

Coming back to the TV special, another way to get at my concern involves the attempt to generate novel “shared” experiences with a deceased individual. I’m imagining a scenario in which the encounter with the “daughter” is truly interactive and isn’t a one-time opportunity to say goodbye and “move on”, but rather a regular occurrence in which the mother tries to prolong the living relationship as though no significant break has taken place.

The better the technology gets, the more seamless the transition will be from interacting with a living person to interacting with a bot version of a deceased person. In fact, such seamlessness seems like precisely the goal of people working on this kind of technology.

Ultimately, it isn’t the mother’s distress that worries me; tears are a sign of recognition that a significant break in a relationship has indeed occurred, and an appropriate reaction when confronted with memories of the relationship. But the birthday party seems like it has the potential to become something else. Death usually means there will be no more celebrations with the deceased, and all we’ve been able to do up to this point in history is reflect (perhaps aided by old letters, pictures, videos, and voicemails) on the ones we shared in the past. If we get to a point where it’s possible to continue, in fairly seamless fashion, celebrating “with” the deceased, then it will be less clear why it matters that the dead are actually gone. Will tears even seem appropriate anymore?

Now before I come across as some hopeless technophobe, I should say I can also envision benefits related to this kind of technological advancement. Furthermore, I must admit that, given the opportunity to hang out with my “dad” in VR from time to time, I probably wouldn’t refuse purely on principle. However, it’s important to anticipate and reflect on the potential pitfalls of near-future technologies. It’s possible they might change us and our practices in somewhat unwelcome ways, but if we see them coming, we’ll be better prepared to reap the benefits of new developments while preserving valuable elements of how things were.

Adam Buben is a Universitair Docent 1 in philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Much of his research – most notably his monograph Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death (2016) – has dealt with the topic of death in the history of philosophy.