The Cruelty of Digital Immortality

I have always found it fascinating that humanity seems incapable of leaving well alone. Give us a problem, and we’ll solve it. Give us an inconvenience, and we’ll build a machine to remove it. It’s one of our greatest strengths, and I wouldn’t wish to lose it. After all, civilisation itself is built on people looking at something difficult and deciding there had to be a better way.

But every so often, I find myself wondering whether we’ve started trying to solve things that were never problems in the first place.

Grief may be one of them.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of stories about companies offering what they describe as digital immortality. Feed an artificial intelligence enough emails, text messages, photographs, social media posts and voice recordings, and it will create an interactive version of someone who has died. Not simply a collection of memories, but something you can continue talking to… a digital echo that replies in their style, remembers shared experiences and, if the marketing is to be believed, allows the conversation to continue indefinitely.

It’s presented as compassionate technology. A comforting bridge between life and loss. Another example of artificial intelligence making our lives a little easier.

Perhaps I’m simply showing my age, but I can’t help feeling that it sounds less like comfort and more like a refusal to accept one of the oldest truths of being human.

I’ve lost people I cared about, as most of us eventually do. Their voices have faded with time. The finer details of conversations have blurred around the edges, and there are moments when I wish I could hear them speak again. I suspect everyone who has experienced loss has felt that quiet ache. It arrives unexpectedly… perhaps when you hear a familiar song or catch the scent of an old aftershave drifting past a stranger in the supermarket.

Memory is a curious thing. It doesn’t preserve people perfectly, and perhaps that’s its greatest kindness. It allows us to carry them forward without trapping either them or ourselves in a single frozen moment.

An AI, however, isn’t offering memory.

It’s offering a simulation.

Those two things may appear similar at first glance, but I think they’re separated by an enormous moral and emotional distance.

Living where I do, in a quiet corner of rural Spain, there are long periods where the only sounds are birds, the occasional barking dog and whatever thoughts happen to wander through my head. Silence has become something I’ve grown rather fond of. It gives the mind room to settle. It allows memories to arrive naturally, without being summoned.

Perhaps that’s why this idea troubles me so much.

We’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with silence. Every spare moment must be filled with notifications, podcasts, videos or conversations. Loneliness becomes another social network. Boredom becomes another streaming service. Even sleep is now monitored by an app that tells us whether we’ve rested correctly.

Now grief appears to have joined the list.

The answer, apparently, is another subscription.

I sometimes wonder how future historians will describe this period in human history. They may conclude that we were the first civilisation to believe every emotion represented an untapped business opportunity. Happiness became an industry. Productivity became an industry. Mindfulness became an industry. It was probably inevitable that bereavement would eventually receive the same treatment.

The commercialisation of grief feels oddly fitting for an age where almost nothing belongs to us anymore. We rent our films, our music and increasingly our software. Cars are becoming services rather than possessions. Books arrive as licences rather than paper. Somewhere along the line, permanence quietly slipped out of fashion.

Now even the dead appear to require a monthly payment.

I can almost picture the conversation taking place in some brightly lit boardroom.

“What if people never had to say goodbye?”

“And how does the revenue model work?”

It would be amusing if it weren’t entirely believable.

None of this is really about artificial intelligence. AI is simply another tool, and like any tool, it can be used wisely or foolishly. I use it myself. I’ve often said that ignoring useful tools simply because they’re new makes little sense. Humanity has always advanced by embracing innovation while trying, usually with mixed success, to retain a measure of common sense.

The question isn’t whether we can build convincing digital versions of people.

The question is whether we should.

That distinction matters more than many seem willing to admit.

Every generation inherits rituals surrounding death. Some gather around graves. Others preserve photographs in albums or keep old letters tied together with ribbon in a drawer. I have photographs that instantly transport me back decades. They don’t speak. They don’t answer questions. They don’t pretend the people within them are still here. They simply remind me that they were.

There is a quiet dignity in that.

A photograph waits patiently until you’re ready to remember. It asks nothing of you. It doesn’t interrupt your healing or tempt you into believing the past can somehow be negotiated with. It simply bears witness.

A conversational AI does something very different. It encourages interaction. It creates the illusion of continuity. Given enough time, I suspect the relationship shifts. You stop remembering the person who died and begin building a new relationship with the software that imitates them.

Whether that’s healthy is a question we seem strangely reluctant to ask.

Perhaps because asking awkward questions has become unfashionable. Technology is supposed to move forwards, and anyone who hesitates risks being labelled nostalgic or resistant to progress. Yet history is littered with examples of inventions that required more than technical brilliance. They required wisdom. Just because something can be built doesn’t automatically mean it deserves a place in our lives.

Death has always been cruel. No technology will change that. Nor should it. The pain of losing someone isn’t evidence that life has malfunctioned. It’s evidence that love leaves a mark. We don’t honour those we’ve lost by pretending they never left. We honour them by carrying their influence into the lives we continue to live.

That has always seemed enough to me.

One day, no doubt, somebody could feed thousands of pages of my writing into an artificial intelligence. It would learn my habits, my fondness for wandering off into observations about modern life, my preference for British spelling and my occasional inability to resist a dry joke. It might even convince people who never knew me that they were having a conversation with Dominus Markham.

They wouldn’t be.

They’d be talking to probability.

To a remarkably clever collection of patterns assembled from the traces I left behind.

And perhaps that’s the point I’d hope they remembered.

Human beings are more than the words we’ve written or the messages we’ve sent. We are the pauses between sentences, the moments we changed our minds, the conversations nobody recorded, the mistakes we’d rather forget and the acts of kindness that never appeared on social media. The most important parts of a life are often the parts that leave no digital footprint at all.

I suspect these services will become increasingly popular over the coming years. Many people will find genuine comfort in them, and I wouldn’t presume to judge anyone searching for a little peace after loss. Grief is intensely personal, and there is no universal roadmap through it.

I only wonder what happens when we become so determined to preserve the voices of the dead that we stop listening to what they taught us while they were alive.

Perhaps the greatest gift memory offers is that it slowly changes shape. It softens the sharp edges without erasing the love. It allows us to smile at stories that once made us cry and to carry people forward without demanding they remain exactly as they were.

We have become extraordinarily good at preserving information. Every photograph, every message, every passing thought can now be stored somewhere in the cloud, ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice.

Wisdom, however, has never lived in databases.

It lives in accepting that some chapters end, some conversations are never finished, and some goodbyes, however painful, deserve to remain exactly that… goodbye.

Until Next Time