Optimization Culture Comes for Grief
An older Korean man named Mr. Lee, dressed in a blazer and slacks, clutches the arms of his chair and leans toward his wife. 'Sweetheart, it's me,' he says. 'It's been a long time.'
'I never expected this would happen to me,' she replies through tears. 'I'm so happy right now.'
Mr. Lee is dead. His widow is speaking to an A.I.-powered likeness of him projected onto a wall.
'Please, never forget that I'm always with you,' the projection says. 'Stay healthy until we meet again.'
This conversation was filmed as part of a promotional campaign for Re;memory, an artificial intelligence tool created by the Korean start-up DeepBrain AI, which offers professional-grade studio and green-screen recording (as well as relatively inexpensive ways of self-recording) to create lifelike representations of the dead.
It's part of a growing market of A.I. products that promise users an experience that closely approximates the impossible: communicating and even "reuniting' with the deceased. Some of the representations — like those offered by HereAfter AI and StoryFile, which also frames its services as being of historical value — can be programmed with the person's memories and voices to produce realistic holograms or chatbots with which family members or others can converse.
The desire to bridge life and death is innately human. For millenniums, religion and mysticism have offered pathways for this — blurring the lines of logic in favor of the belief in eternal life.
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