[ad_1]
MY MOM was the one one who would chuckle at my corny jokes. That’s partly as a result of she was, in a way, laughing at herself: I obtained my foolish sense of humour from her.
I’ll by no means hear her simple, girlish chuckle once more. She died final 12 months on 17 January on the age of 76, and there are nonetheless days once I would give something to listen to her voice. To my shock, I just lately discovered that I may, and all I must do is provide her information to considered one of myriad “grief tech” apps out there. For a small sum of cash, and even without cost, I may feed outdated voicemails, movies, textual content messages and emails into an algorithm and generate a digital avatar of her.
With the worst of my grief behind me, I’m tempted. I may select my very own commune-with-the-dead journey utilizing artificially clever chatbots, conversational movies and even an interactive séance. However there are dangers. These digital alter egos, which have been round for a number of years, have gotten disarmingly lifelike. I fear that maintaining my mother round within the cloud – or my dad, who died 9 months earlier – will wreck my grieving course of. Will conjuring her digital ghost preserve me related, or may I regress to these painful months simply after her demise?
We don’t but understand how this burgeoning trade will change {our relationships} with family members who’ve handed. However current psychological fashions of grief, paired with new insights into its neural mechanisms, give trigger for concern. The rising realism of those apps permits them to “feed into the problem of grief”, says psychologist …
[ad_2]
Source link
