Sydney Bradley

And I spoke to one legal expert who is a professor of law in England and is writing a book exactly about digital rights for the deceased.

And one thing that was really interesting that she said is, will we need to have a clause in our wills that says, do not bot me?

Yeah, it's like the new DNR will be do not make me into a existentially permanent bot.

Depending on how good the technology is.

I mean, so the other technologies being built are startups.

built by people who have also lost people.

And that's the entire impetus for them starting these companies.

That feels maybe a bit more like you have a tie to the actual experience and it's a smaller business.

It's not a meta scale company.

I think people maybe feel more ready to experience something there if they trust the company.

But there's still so many question marks around this space.

One person I spoke to as well for the story who had started his own company around this technology told me that the grieving process is already bad.

Why not make it a little bit better for people?

But then at the same time, a sociologist I spoke to said the most important element of grief is the permanence of it all.

Will tools like this disrupt that process of grief?

There's so, so many existential questions on this topic that it's an endless rabbit hole of yes, but...

Yeah, and in ways we've always been talking to the dead.

We go to funerals, we go to gravestones, people's Facebook walls, people post every year on their birthdays, even if they do know that they have passed.

I think for a technology like this, a really important detail would have a requirement to have the accounts be labeled as dead.

some sort of bot, that would be, it could be deeply traumatic for some people if you didn't know that they were dead, but they were continuing to post.