GriefTech Can Let You “Speak” To Your Dead Relatives. Would You Use It?

Imagine a world where you could instantly converse with someone who had passed away as if they were still around. This decidedly sci-fi idea increasingly known as "GriefTech" has rapidly become a reality, as Charlotte Jee explores for the MIT Technology Review's Mortality Issue. Platforms from companies with names like HereAfter and Storyfile charge a fee to create these digital clones from a series of real interviews they conduct with someone before they pass. Those responses are stitched together into an avatar capable of conversing with the living.

As Jee writes, "the technology and the world it’s enabling are, unsurprisingly, imperfect, and the ethics of creating a virtual version of someone are complex." It is easy to imagine these ethical tradeoffs being a small price to pay, though, for the chance to have just one more conversation with someone who has passed away. Even if it does probably make it harder to let them go.