Can We Still Honor the Dead When Technology Refuses to Let Them Go?

“If you had the chance to talk to someone that died, that you love, would you take it? Without knowing what the risk is, without knowing what the outcome is?”

That was one of the early questions posed in the 2024 documentary Eternal You by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck. The film shows how technology is already weaving itself into both our life and our post-life. It can take the form of a digital avatar accessible through augmented reality, or an AI bot that mimics the memory and voice of a loved one. With enough data, post-mortem life is already possible, though it still needs refinement to appear more ‘real.’

Several perspectives stood out throughout the entire 87 minutes. The creator of Project December argues that consenting adults should be free to use the technology however they wish, and that developers should not be held responsible for how users choose to engage with it. He refuses to pull back simply because people might use his tool differently than intended. This echoes Sam Altman in the same film, who insists that as a tech creator he tries to be transparent about risks and focus on mitigating worst-case scenarios.

Then there’s an elderly woman, confronted with a grief bot of her late brother created by her granddaughter. To her, as a religious being, it was a sin. We are not meant to disturb the dead, she said. Honouring them means letting them go and cherishing the memories we still hold, not resurrecting fragments through code. For her, the technology crosses into playing God, and she wants ==no part of it.==

What struck me most, though, was hearing from sociologist Sherry Turkle, whose work I’ve followed since my undergraduate years. She argued that in this stage of AI development, technology is beginning to promise what religion once did. The rise of the digital afterlife industry makes tech an interchangeable platform for life after death. With AI, we can be reborn elsewhere, inside augmented reality, or as a grief bot on the glowing screen of your loved one’s device. For now, though we can only download the dead, a ‘reverse mechanism’ if you will. But eventually, she suggests, we will upload ourselves, leaving versions of us for others to connect with long after our physical bodies are gone.

She calls this a modern form of transcendence. Eventually, she says, the uncanny will fade. We will start to accept these tools as comfort instead of something creepy. And then she asks: if this becomes our comfort, what exactly are we doing to ourselves?

Eternal You doesn’t let us escape that question. It forces us to see this industry as both looming and already here. It leaves us with homework, should grief remain private and sacred, or do we need to actively safeguard ourselves against the inevitable rise of the digital afterlife industry (DAI)? In late capitalism, death is unavoidable, grief is universal, and nothing sells more easily than emotion.

In marketing, I’ve learned the blunt truth: the more vulnerable a feeling, the easier it is to sell.

Perhaps the real question is not whether AI can comfort us, but whether we still know how to respect the dead through technology. Do we even have the right to spin them back up for our own solace? If this is where we’re heading, what safeguards do we need as a society to navigate it? Scholars like Hollanek & Nowaczyk-Basińska have already suggested in 2024 layered forms of consent to preserve dignity, but dignity is fragile when profit is the driving force.

This documentary made me rethink the future I’m still so excited about. While some are focused on making life bearable, others are building algorithms that can mimic the dead with uncanny precision in the name of comfort through and beyond grief.

Will 2025 mark the last generation that sees death as we currently know it?

Will death itself become redefined, replaced by a new kind of continuity? If that’s the direction we’re moving in, what happens when people stop believing in death at all, because everyone can, with consent, be spun back up in augmented reality through artificial intelligence? Does grief shift from letting go to a perpetual connection managed by platforms? This trajectory forces us to imagine how radically society might change if death itself is no longer final. Will we approach death differently? Will we begin documenting every detail of our lives obsessively, not for ourselves but to preserve a future version? And if so, are we still living or are we just curating our own digital afterlives?

Here lies the danger, if grief becomes just another subscription, mourning collapses into a business model. Comfort becomes a product. Our inability to let go turns into someone else’s revenue stream. In the logic of late capitalism, nothing is too sacred to commodify, not even loss.

Perhaps the hardest question Eternal You leaves us with is not whether grief-as-a-service is possible, but whether we should allow our most human experience, loss, to be outsourced to an industry that profits from our inability to let go. \n