Grief and technology
Griefbots, uploads and the machines that remember the dead: mourning in the near future.
5 pieces on Nearfi: 4 reviews and 1 essay. Across their 17 tracked predictions, 8 have arrived, 4 are arriving, 4 are near, 1 are far off and 0 went another way. The average P(n) is 73%. Closest to now: After Yang at 86%. Furthest: Pantheon at 56%.
- ARRIVED A text chatbot built from a dead person's own messages and posts can hold new conversations in that person's style with the people they left behind. Black Mirror: Be Right Back · 2016
- ARRIVING A general-purpose humanoid robot lives in the family home as a member of the household. After Yang
- ARRIVED A companion robot bought for a child stops working because its manufacturer has gone out of business, leaving the family to grieve it. After Yang · 2024
- ARRIVED A household device secretly records intimate moments, and the footage or audio is retained in ways owners were never told about. After Yang · 2019
- ARRIVED Companies sell interactive digital versions of dead people to the people who survive them. Upload · 2024
- ARRIVING Software agents do skilled engineering work that companies previously paid people to do. Pantheon · est. 2029
- ARRIVING An ordinary person's everyday posts and messages leave a data trail large enough to model their personality and conversational style convincingly. Black Mirror: Be Right Back · est. 2030
- ARRIVING People own self-driving cars that drive them without a human at the wheel. Upload · est. 2031
- NEAR A digital mind is granted moral or legal standing of its own. Pantheon · est. 2045
- NEAR A synthetic body made to look like a specific dead person, running a model of their personality, can live in the home and pass as that person at close quarters without a human operator. Black Mirror: Be Right Back · est. 2055
The guide: Sci-Fi About Grief and Technology: 4 Stories About Keeping the Dead →
The Kindest Machine
We were afraid the machines would be cold. The trouble is that they're kinder than we are, and children are learning from them what kindness should cost.
The Attic Is a Subscription Now
In 2013 Charlie Brooker imagined a machine built from a dead man's messages. He got the grief exactly right and the shop completely wrong.
A Few Seconds, Chosen With Love
Kogonada's gentle film about a broken android son is the least sensational AI story of its decade, and the first one that knew what the real heartbreak would be.
Deleted, Then Restored
AMC's animated upload drama was wiped from its own service before it finished, survived on other people's servers, and turned out to be the smartest story about digital minds on television.
Heaven Has a Data Cap
Greg Daniels's digital-afterlife comedy has one great joke, that heaven is a subscription tier, and spends four seasons explaining it to us.
More themes: AI and machine minds · Surveillance and scoring · Space · Climate and scarcity · Pandemics and collapse · Borders and migration · Clones and genetics · Memory · Work