Hitting TV screens in the UK right now is a new BBC Storyville documentary, Eternally You, ‘delving into world of startups using AI to create avatars of the deceased.’
The Guardian ran a 5-star review of it, which I do think it deserves. As they outline:
Joshua Barbeau […] uses it to talk to his fiancee, Jessica, whose life-support machine he had to turn off and whose hand he held as she died. Christi Angel uses the service to talk to her beloved partner, Cameroun, to whose last text she was too busy to respond before he fell into a coma from which he never emerged.
The Guardian
As I posted a couple of weeks ago, this is another example of AI being seen as a technology that can solve all of the deep ‘problems’ of human existence… so long as we frame them as problems that actually need solving. So grief becomes not just a painful process of coming to terms with loss, but a problem that needs fixing. And with these new systems, they are going further, perhaps looking to solve the problem of death itself – as I outline in much more detail in the book.
Lucy Mangan puts it well in her review:
[This film is] about the opening up of an abyss of horrors masquerading as answers to unbearable longings, into which some people will willingly jump, others will fall, and over whose edge all of humanity will eventually be dragged, kicking, screaming, but with no other choice. It is about the death of grace, the death perhaps of the meaning of life itself.
The death of grace… the death of the meaning of life itself…
Is this not the irony of achieving a ‘god-like’ status? The fact of being eternal perhaps paradoxically doesn’t increase the value of life. Unable to die, it radically empties life of meaning. By ‘solving’ death, do we not in fact empty life of what makes it so rich?
This is where I’d argue that a radical reframing of Christianity – as I’ve proposed in Getting High – that centres around the profound moment of the death of God, and refuses resurrection – is one that lifts life to be the most precious thing, to be valued and prized. It is only in this atheist reading of faith that life truly has rich meaning, precisely because it can be lost.
But against this, our history is full of those who’ve peddled ‘solutions’ to the problem of death… and looked to extract value for themselves out of this deepest part of the human condition. It is why the question of AI – and the ‘god-like’ systems we are increasingly seeing created – is ultimately a religious one… requiring theological, as well as technological reflection.
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