Can Bots Help Us Deal with Grief?

How simulations can bring our loved ones back to life

Technology is, inevitably, encroaching on the human experience of death, both in popular culture and real life. On screen, Smallville’s Clark Kent gets advice on how to become Superman from an AI version of his deceased father, and in “Be Right Back,” a haunting episode of the sci-fi series Black Mirror, a woman copes with grief by ordering an android simulation of her deceased partner.

In the real world, people are experimenting with griefbots. Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, principal data scientist at KenSci, is often the center of attention when the topic of griefbots comes up.

He created a chat-style program that allows him to have conversations with a simulation of his father, who passed away a few years ago. Muhammad took several philosophy classes with me when he was an undergraduate at Rochester Institute of Technology, and over the years we’ve become friends.

Muhammad’s experiences bring into stark relief the pain that loss can bring, and he has publicly taken up the cause of trying to spark conversations about the benefits and dilemmas involved with creating simulations of the deceased. Read Muhammad’s reflections in “How the Dearly Departed Could Come Back to Life — Digitally” and “After Death: Big Data and the…