Words can bestow immortality (Getty)
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Towards the end of September 1915, the eminent physicist Oliver Lodge heard from his son Raymond, who had gone to fight in Flanders that spring. His situation was “difficult”, but “he has got so many kind friends helping him. He didn’t think when he waked up first that he was going to be happy, but now he is, and he says he is going to be happier. He knows that as soon as he is a little more ready he has got a great deal of work to do.”
Just two weeks earlier, Raymond had been struck by a German shell while he was building trenches near Ypres. A fellow officer wrote to Oliver that “he had seen your son in a dug-out, with a man watching him. He was then quite unconscious though still breathing with difficulty. I could see it was all over with him. He was still just alive when I went away.” Within half an hour he was dead. Another officer sent him a description of the cemetery in which he had been buried that very evening.
This solemn correspondence marked a beginning rather than an end. After the “first shock of bereavement”, the whole Lodge family had soon developed a “perception of his continued usefulness”. They visited spiritualist mediums who passed on to them Raymond’s utterances from another world. Raymond: Or Life and Death (1916), the book in which Oliver collected these happenings, went through 12 editions in three years. It was both a symptom and an intended vindication of a startling social phenomenon. Although people in Britain and the United States had experimented in contacting the spirit world for more than half a century, the First World War caused a dramatic spike in the practice of spiritualism, as mourners flocked to get in touch with their dead ones.
Raymond makes for affecting but also timely reading today, when Artificial Intelligence is likewise promising to resurrect the dead — for a fee. A number of tech start-ups, such as HereAfter AI and Séance AI, are marketing chatbots that use the digital records of a deceased relative to speak in their voice. Another company, South Korea’s DeepBrain AI, creates video avatars that capture a relative’s mannerisms and voice. A chat window might seem a very different and perhaps more rational place to meet the dead than a “sitting” with a medium. Yet it is worth reflecting on their similarities.
Spiritualists share with the makers of griefbots a conviction that people live in — and live on — in their words. It is true that paranormal happenings were common in sittings. Raymond once spun a table so violently that he broke flowerpots. But Oliver considered the best evidence for his survival to be what he said. At first, he was terse, dropping in references to poems or the initials of friends into his chat with mediums. In time, he became voluble. Yes, he had a body where he now was, a place called “Summer”, which was “such a solid place, I have not got over it yet. It is so wonderfully real.” No, he didn’t understand how it all worked, but he lived in a brick house there and you could get a whisky and soda. A friend of his had successfully requested a cigar.
How could these words convince as well as console? Like a good LLM engineer, Oliver assembled as big a textual corpus as possible. Before readers of Raymond met its posthumous hero, they ploughed through his letters from the Western Front. These beige epistles represented the war as “most like a long picnic in all sorts of places with a sort of constraint and uneasiness in the air”. Their anxious jauntiness echoed the fragmentary reports from “Summer” and so supported Lodge’s broader claim that “personality persists” after death. There is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living and so “methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection”.
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SubscribeThe human mind seems capable of convincing itself of anything. It’s not a matter of intellect, as the case of Oliver Lodge demonstrates.
How, then, do we seperate out what actually exists in contrast to what we wish existed? Those who believe in an afterlife, as with followers of all religions which posit an ‘immortal soul’, do so for purposes which are laid bare by the wish fulfilment of a father grieving for his son, slain on a foreign field.
Which brings us to Griefbots. Rather than find comfort in this form of ‘communication’ with the deceased, it fills me with horror. We’re all familiar with the imaginary conversations we might have with someone no longer alive, or perhaps no longer in our lives (whilst still alive); a former relative, friend, or lover perhaps. But having their words made manifest via AI, and frozen in time and maturity at the point they died, just seems to diminish the actual memory of them by stretching it beyond their living selves, as they were when alive and which we remember.
I’ve no doubt others will disagree with this. I wonder if this exemplifies the divergence between those who hold – or need – religious beliefs, and those such as myself who don’t? Perhaps the rise of Griefbots will help us understand the well-springs of such divergence.
A very good article that went in a different direction than I expected. The Griefbots sound horrific in every dimension, but the article made the Lodge family’s grief-driven quest both relatable and quite noble in its own way.