Dying Tomorrow: 5 Questions for the Future of Death & Mourning
exploring the impact of big data, AI, and augmented reality as it shapes our perceptions of loss.
Originally published on nextrends.
In November of 2019, thousands of people across the United States received strange text messages intended to be sent on Valentine’s Day. It turned out these messages had been stuck in a server that had gone offline on February 14 — when it kicked back on, on November 7, it sent out all the messages that it had stored right before the server died.
From The Verge:
Barbara Coll, who lives in California, said she received an old message from her sister saying that their mom was upbeat and doing well. She knew the message must have been sent before their mother died in June, but she said it was still shocking to receive.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about that message since I got it,” Coll said. “I’m out looking at the ocean right now because I needed a break.”
Another Twitter user received a message from an ex-boyfriend who had died since that Valentine’s Day. The company that hosted the server sent out a press release: “We apologize for the confusion.”
“The confusion” is an apt name for the era that digitization has given us. The post-digital world is all out of sync, with algorithms and data traffic determining what you see when. If you’ve ever lost someone, you know the jolt of discovering an artifact of their presence just after they’re gone: a strand of hair on a hairbrush, a note for groceries taped to the refrigerator door, a thumbprint on a glass.
Today, that thumbprint is on our smart phones, and it unlocks a portal to a vast constellation of artifacts that live beyond our bodies. Today, the residue of our life is data, and while a strand of hair breaks down and fingerprints get washed away, our data lives on without us: decentralized, always ready to live again — a ghost in the voicemail. The algorithms are modern-day necromancers, spirit hustlers invoking the dead back to life through magic, unknowable rituals, allowing them to speak to us once again, regardless of how we choose to mourn, or forget, or remember.
In order to anticipate the ways technology might change the way we grieve — and to understand how it already has, often in less than healthy ways — we brought together five experts on history, design, artificial intelligence, anthropology and psychology for our “Dying Tomorrow” workshop. There, 48 members of the public were lead through a human-centered design process around the question: How might we design new rituals for mourning in a post-digital world? Crucially, participants applied this learning to design these new rituals for mourning, which served as signals of possible emergent futures pointing to how we might die tomorrow.
Here are five key takeaways, framed as questions that might help us imagine the possibilities we want technology to create for memory and mourning, before they become inevitable.
HOW LONG HAVE WE BEEN DYING, ANYWAY?
Tradition weighs heavy in our mourning rituals, but the way we die today is relatively new. To look at how pliable our past and future rituals for death & mourning truly are, we can turn to the history of science, as well as science fiction.
Megan Rosenbloom, co-creator of the Death Salon and leader of the death positivity movement with The Order of the Good Death, spoke about the impact of trains and embalming fluid: when the Civil War inflicted mass casualties, these bodies needed to be moved. Trains could take them from place to place, but the bodies needed to be preserved. When the bodies of the civil war dead no longer needed to be preserved, the embalming business needed a new source of income. So they touted the preservation of bodies, and began to push a pivot from the “home funeral” to the “funeral home,” a service that would come and take the body, preserve it, and present it.
“Death has become a statistic that we are to see as a failure if it gets too high — not a shared destiny to be present with.”
— FRANCESCA BOSISIO
What had once been a home ritual, with a doctor (or priest) beside the bed, soon became a crisis of action. That has transformed the way we mourn. Rather than sitting in the present and feeling our loss, or taking time to experience grief, we leap toward a new, medical ritual of calling doctors and funeral homes, often with unnecessary urgency that deprives us of the comfort of mourning in critical moments. Today, many Americans would tell you — wrongfully — that a person who has just died needs to be removed from the site immediately; we fear disease or other unknown calamities.
William Hope, Spirit Photography circa 1920, created through use of a double exposure. Public Domain.
Francesca Bosisio of the University of Lausanne spoke of this medicalization as another technological influence on the lack of space mourners are given to grieve in those moments.
“Death has become a statistic that we are to see as a failure if it gets too high — not a shared destiny to be present with,” she noted. Such distancing speaks to a denial of death prevalent in Western Culture, clearly evident in our science fiction stories of cyborgs, or in Silicon Valley’s blood-transfusion obsession. But practices like these also affirm a power imbalance in the medical industry: our views of death are entirely informed by doctors, who often grow numb to — or simply do not recognize — the contours of a healthy mourning process. This is deeply individual, personalized, and requires deep care and empathy that can often be lacking in rushed hospital rooms.
Finally, we might worry that technology could be turned toward exploitation, rather than healing. Consider the invention of the camera, and the practice of the death portrait: family members once posed with the recently deceased to preserve a final moment of that person’s physical presence. In turning to technology to preserve this memory, the practice speaks to the humanist impulse to remember what we have lost through every tool we have.
Crucially, this Utopian possibility — to keep an image of a loved one near, even after their body had been buried — also unlocked new ways for technology to exploit human emotions: spirit photography. These photographs were a huckster’s racket, where self-claimed psychic photographers would expose film to an image of a “spirit,” often no more than a photograph wrapped in cotton, and then re-expose a portrait of a living person, promising that they could prove the presence of a guardian spirit. This practice — a simple technique involving a glitch in film exposure — tapped into a glitch in the human mind, which is the desire to believe, in times of sadness, that there is some way to bring all of yesterday into tomorrow.
2. ARE WE MORE THAN THE SUM OF OUR DATA?
Sean Mulholland, from IDEO, is a curator of his family history with an active interest in the ways that technology can handle our digital legacies. He’s written an article focused on signals of the future of memory in an age of digital archives, of streaming music instead of records, watchlists instead of films, and of course, reams of public and private communication, selfies, and geotagged photos, even online receipts tracking our spending.
Soon, he says, will be able to create digital avatars of our own identities: mirror images of ourselves that can communicate on our behalf, even appear in video and voice chats. Mulholland points out the Salvador Dali Museum’s revival of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali through “deepfake” technology.
Each of us, most likely, already has the data to create an avatar like Dali. Mulholland cites an IBM study that 90% of the data humans have created has been generated since 2016. That’s going to come faster and more complex as technology becomes more present and invisible. Tools for collecting data will become denser and faster in the age of 5G networks; computing power and cloud analysis tools (such as artificial intelligence) will ramp up accordingly to help humans sort and analyze more data even faster.
After all, you can already download someone from the App store. Mulholland shared the story of Roman Mazurenko, the artificial intelligence application based on the life of Roman Mazurenko built by a close friend shortly after Mazurenko’s death. The app was a neural network built from text and social media messages the real Mazurenko had written in his lifetime. Mazurenko was already interested in redesigning our experience of death, intrigued by the idea of “memorial forests” where each tree could display a digital biography of the person whose grave had fed its roots. The app seemed like an apt tribute to his memory.
This raises the question of what we are preserving when we create a digital replica of ourselves. Personalities are already a difficult-to-define thing, but for a neural network, these personalities would be based simple arithmetic. A machine would analyze chat logs and create weighted corollaries between words to discover the idiosyncrasies of speech and spoken desires. An AI will never be "me," unless I am also a series of scores: maybe the machine figures out that I'm a +5 on anxiety, a -3 on knowledge about tax law and black olives. When you ask the AI if it wants to grab a slice of pizza, the response might be appropriate: “Sure, but is it OK that I don’t want to get black olives on the pizza?”
“Will people really be comforted by the knowledge of these digital avatars living our lives after we die?”
If you sum up all of the data I generate across my lifetime, you might have a machine that could create a pretty convincing imitation of “me,” but will people really be comforted by the knowledge of these digital avatars living our lives after we die?
We posed that question during the “Dying Tomorrow” workshop and event. To some, creating an avatar was no different from writing a book, or a poem, or a song. It was something we create to pass along to the next generation — a gift to comfort the people we leave behind, something that might offer solace to people when they don’t have us. An avatar is not about the person it copies, but about the people who interact with our lifelong project made of data. If that’s comforting, some said, who cares if it’s “who we are,” or not?
3. WHO OWNS THE DATA OF THE DEAD?
For others, this did not sit so easily. Data, of course, isn’t always “ours” — it belongs to companies and institutions. When we die in analog, we leave behind books and records. But it isn’t clear who owns our ebooks, or our Spotify playlists, when we aren’t around to claim them. Who inherits these, as well as our more granular, more private data — our chatlogs, our browsing history? If we imagine our loved ones interacting with an AI built on these digital breadcrumbs, could ownership of our data become ownership of our identities? The workshop identified three possible impacts.
First, as Sean Mulholland noted, it places new importance on the preservation of important personal data — when high school bands disappeared from a MySpace data failure, or millions of Geocities sites were deleted, or Flickr deletes the oldest photographs on free accounts, this can be the equivalent of burning copies of photo albums or throwing away a diary.
The second impact is the question of control. Natural Language Processing (simply put, the AI that responds to human text in a learned style) can be incredibly seductive: it is designed to make us believe that there's something like a consciousness going on behind it. How can we make sure this seductive power of technology, or in VR, the allure of alternate and augmented realities, is used to comfort us without exploiting us?
Ajay Chander, Vice President of AI Research at Fujitsu Labs America, presented an optimistic view of how AI might evolve to become an empathetic partner that empowers us to experience, and be present with, our emotions. To do so, technology will have to be designed with the goal of addressing loss, worry, and regrets, moving us toward new goals for well-being rooted in love and connection, purpose, and safety.
The third impact was, interestingly, most notable from Swiss contributors: the digital right to be forgotten. Data-driven avatars raise a new set of questions: how do you end a digital life? Who “inherits” the digital replica?
One solution from the design workshop aimed to raise awareness of these issues through a lesson plan for a high school art curriculum. The lesson would encourage students to create a self-portrait based on their digital data alone: the images on their phones, the steps they walked in a day, or creating portraits based exclusively on the data “owned” by a social media network they use. What do students look like as “data”? The goal would be to encourage reflection over their digital legacies, but also to begin thinking about the actions and activities online they might want to preserve — or delete.
Another group proposed an Alexa app that could help preserve memories of a person even after they are gone, by relying not on trails of data but by the memories of those who knew them. “Hey Alexa, remember this about Hank,” for example, could be used when reminiscing about lost friends or family. The stored data could become a kind of family album, offering a shared resources for fleshing out memories of family members that could be passed on across generations.
4. COULD THERE BE A “FUNERAL FILTER BUBBLE?”
The post-digital age is often defined as the era of individualization. Today, fewer people see movies in theaters; they watch them on Netflix. Our news feeds show us the news we agree with, protects us from what we don’t like to see. The shared, communal experience is becoming rare.
As we begin to think of AIs mimicking our personalities, or the digital media collections we curate to represent us, we also face a rising variety of rituals for death. These include water cremations; forest burials that double as land conservation; even human composting, in which city terraces are landscaped by living plants fertilized by bodies. This is not what we think of when we speak about “digitization.” But it reflects a growing demand for individualized, personal expressions of identity.
The right to choose your rituals on your own terms — here, presented entirely in analog; the simple choice of a cat on a grave, rather than a cross, speaks to the personal right to define your own death.
It pointed to another question: If funerals are for the living, a tradition that allows us to connect to an asynchronous, multi-generational legacy of shared grief, observed in the same ways, does individualization threaten a healthy mourning? Many of our rituals around death are comforting because they are familiar. They connect us to memories and experiences of others in our family, communities, or faiths (or lack thereof). Do the living deserve a traditional ceremony — or does the self-expression of the dead take precedence?
Francesca Bosisio suggested it wasn’t an either-or question. “There is not one single way to mourn,” she said, and so we should welcome the erosion of a one-size-fits-all rite of passage as the most appropriate form of finding closure. Perhaps the prescription of a fixed path of mourning, dictated by tradition, is actually less helpful than adjusting our grief to the desires and personalities of those we’ve lost: a way to experience that person more fully in their absence.
“The question becomes, who owns the narrative?”
A workshop participant noted that, if funerals are for the living, and if “who we are” is different for different people, then the highly personalized funeral forces a reckoning between the person we thought we knew and that person’s perception of themselves. “The question becomes, who owns the narrative?” they said. While it can be empowering to know that you will create a funeral on your own terms, the people who knew one piece of you deserve the right to mourn that version of who you were. But perhaps the social norms will adapt to create a new, more empowering ritual — where our deaths become a way to become more fully known, to be more active in telling the story of our lives when that story ends.
During the workshop, one group presented the idea of a Virtual Reality experience, “Some Day Soon,” which put people into the experience of mourning in a variety of cultural contexts. This would encourage acceptance of the diversity of mourning, while challenging the notion of a prescribed path to “good grief” (in the words of Ajay Chander). The game would include a series of small puzzle elements that could only be resolved through the commitment to empathize with the needs of the character they embodied.
5. CAN WE “DISRUPT” DEATH DENIAL?
“When humans are given a long time window, they tend to perceive time as an infinite resource.”
— AJAY CHANDER
Research shows that “when humans are given a long time window, they tend to perceive time as an infinite resource,” said Ajay Chander, responding to Megan Rosenbloom’s observation that the doubling of human life expectancy in just 200 years means that each of us experiences two lifetimes, not one. This has only exacerbated the issue of death denial: a refusal to confront and acknowledge our own mortality, or even the mortality of others. Part of it is that people don’t die at home, while industrialized farming has taken us away from butchering animals. The result is that we simply don’t encounter death on the same, daily basis as we once did.
But death denial — a phenomenon identified in 1973 by Ernest Becker — can lead to an unhealthy belief that human symbols of immortality are more important than anything else. As such, a fetishism for long-lasting monuments, like walls or skyscrapers, take precedence over human suffering. The result of death denial is philosophy that fuels aggressive behavior, always defending death, always shifting focus away from people and toward symbols of power. Becker ties these ideologies to a decline in humility and empathy — giving rise to racism, bigotry, and genocide.
Chander proposed that extremely long time spans, including our own life expectancies, can lead to the “discounting the future self.” He shared a health management app that helps users visualize mortality as a grid of 52 boxes (the number of weeks in a year) repeated for the number of years in a user’s life expectancy. The user is asked to set goals — children, retirement, travel — which appear in the “calendar” as small icons. And then, it records health data based on the changing impact of actions on your life expectancy, transforming “time” from an abundant resource into a scarce one. In essence, forcing the user to ask: “how do I want to spend my time?”
“Death and grief freezes the frame,” Chander said. “We don’t put energy into it, we don’t let it grow.” Well designed systems help us grow death — that is, they allow us to create space for, and awareness of, what limited time we have left.
In an unusual design solution to this challenge, one group during the workshop suggested a hashtag dedicated to roadkill; the proximity to dead animals would serve to create a digital proximity to death (with the added bonus of helping local road crews get the animals picked up).
But “normalizing” the experience of death was a topic for two of the design ideas that emerged from the workshop: social media and poster campaigns, for example. But also to normalize the relationship with digital legacies through “product placement” campaigns in which best practices for digital legacy management became embedded into films and television, as well as young adult fiction and other education campaigns. This was pushed further by one group asking, “what’s our Trojan horse?” — acknowledging the difficulty of getting people to engage with the idea of their mortality. Family health history and family heritage were identified as potentially appealing “hooks” to bring people to the platform.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Technology shapes human rituals in ways that inevitably feel natural, as if the way we do things today is the way they have always been. These can be long-lasting — as in the case of the simple application of embalming fluid, which is now ingrained into the American funeral — or temporary: the emergence of the death portrait, and its exploitation by so-called psychic photographers, points to two flares that have long since faded.
The topic of digital death is also about identity, and it might point to a critical difference between mirrors and screens. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that our imagination is born in mirrors. It happens the first time we recognize an image in a reflection — we “imagine” that reflection is ours, because that image finally makes sense of our bodies as a whole, complete thing. We turn to the parent as an authority figure to confirm it — and the parent says yes, yes, it’s you, that thing in the mirror. And this, Lacan says, is the birth of the social realm: the need to rely on others to confirm what we imagine ourselves to be.
When that mirror becomes a screen, things get confusing, and the turn to the social fades away. The screen is the mirror where we imagine ourselves — and the screen confirms our imagination. And so we have the so-called selfie generation, a new stage of development in which we’re handing over data to confirm the persistence of our identity. That used to take place in the social realm. But now this reflection starts talking to us, starts suggesting brands of toothpaste based on our previous toothpaste selections, occasionally shares our credit card numbers with strangers on accident.
Most shocking of all, that data goes on to reflect our “self” even when the body has long faded away. The screen replaces society as a way to confirm who we are. And that could mean relationships, and cultural bonds, begin to change. If this leads to an embrace of death denial — a future in which we focus on the creation of new, digital monuments to our triumph over death — then we have a dystopia to fear.
“Thoughtful design could help us create tools to help us grieve in healthy ways, confront the limits of our lifespans, and communicate memories even further across generations.”
But this doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Like all technology, we can also look to Utopian possibilities. Thoughtful design could help us create tools to help us grieve in healthy ways, to confront the limits of our own lifespans, to communicate memories even further across generations. Such tools could be designed to strengthen social connections and fuel a stronger sense of stewardship for future generations, knowing that, in some way, they will be the ones who preserve our memories, who keep us alive through their interactions and explorations of our post-mortal chatbots.
The Dying Tomorrow workshop was about anticipating and designing the future we want, before we have to sort through the future that’s built for us. A way to shape this future toward Utopian, rather than Dystopian, futures. We’ve created a LinkedIn group to share signals of these emergent futures of death and mourning — join us, and let’s keep the conversation going.
VIDEO
The Dying Tomorrow Workshop was presented in partnership with HESAV (School of Health Sciences) in Lausanne, the University of Lausanne, and the Board of Higher Education (DGES) of the Canton de Vaud, with local support from the Institute for the Future and Leonardo.
Throughout 2019, swissnex San Francisco brought together experts from a wide range of disciplines to explore the questions we confront in an age of CRISPR, genetics, the datafication of DNA, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology. Connecting artists and scientists, this LifeCycle Series posed challenging questions about where we want our tech to take us: not only looking at what is possible today, but how to be responsible stewards of our new health-tech revolution.
Written by Eryk Salvaggio
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