The Digital Future of Grief
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Why do people save voicemails and how does loss of them affect grief?
A show where philosophy and reality meet.
From Alexandra Salmon has been saving her mom's voicemails for years. Hello, sweetheart. Dad and I are out to eat and he just went to the Alex, why have you been doing that?
There's just something about her voice that always makes me feel better. Tell you how proud I am of you and It's almost like a portal into our relationship. Think of your family and I love you very much. And then one day I changed cell phone carriers and all of the voicemails disappeared. I was devastated.
Did you try to get them back?
Yes I did. I actually checked the cloud, but unfortunately they weren't there. I really felt like I had lost a part of her that I just don't think I can ever get back.
Is she still alive?
She is, thankfully. So I have started backing up her voicemails. But, you know, she's seventy-eight, so I'm very aware that our time is limited together.
What are you gonna do with all this audio one day?
It's really interesting because when I've been thinking about this, I came across these companies that are doing these really interesting and kind of unsettling things to reanimate the dead.
Have you talked to your mom about this? And what does she think?
She's fascinated by it. She seems to really come at it from more of a lens of curiosity rather than having a lot of judgment about it.
From Slate, this is Hi Fi Nation, philosophy in story form. Recording from Princeton University, here's Barry Lamb.
The parts of our lives we leave behind, our letters, voice recordings, pictures, and videos, are becoming largely digital. And what's digital can be endlessly processed. Some technology can even give people a digital afterlife.
Ultimately, I don't believe that a digital representation of somebody isn't them.
On this episode of Hi Fi Nation. We're going to look at technology that seeks to preserve a person after their death and even extend their digital lives beyond death. so that those who are alive can continue to interact with them, maybe even forever, in a digital space. The technology is so new. that it isn't available at scale at the time I'm recording this. But it might very well be available by the time you listen to this episode. For futurists, creating digital afterlives can mean anything from a new tool for grief counseling to to the end of human grief completely. For philosophers, it means that our thought experiments are no longer science fiction, but science fact. The longstanding philosophical question
Of what needs to survive in order for a person to survive. Is now turning into a technological question. Maybe even a business and marketing question. We need to help people answer it. Producer Alex Salmon and I bring you this story.
Melody and Justin are mother and son. Within a span of six weeks in the fall of twenty nineteen, it looked like the world was conspiring to end that.
I was riding home from work uh on my motorcycle and uh lady ran a stop sign and and almost killed me.
Before the accident. Justin was a successful film producer and director in Los Angeles. He had nine broken ribs, and One of which snapped in half and lodged in his lung, collapsing it. His hip was broken and dislocated. His ankle shattered.
My leg was actually turned the wrong direction. While I was flying, I went to brace myself with my left arm. One of my arms was like a macaroni elbow and the the other leg was the wrong direction and now it's suffocating in my own blood. While I was in the process of recovering, my mom was down here taking care of me.
Justin's mom, Melody, was not feeling well herself on that trip. But the last thing she wanted to do at a time like that was step away from Justin. Anyway, she thought she knew what her health issue was. And it wasn't a big deal.
She had known that she needed to get her gallbladder out for you know, ten years at that point. They'd be like, Yeah, you gotta take this out, you gotta get rid of it. So after about God, six weeks, eight weeks of being done here with me, you know, it was like, All right, we gotta get her home and get this gallbladder out.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do people save voicemails and how does loss of them affect grief?
0:03–5:47
2
How did Justin’s accident and his mother’s cancer diagnosis spark the AI project?
5:47–12:12
3
What steps did Justin take to create a digital version of his mother?
12:12–17:30
4
Why did Justin focus on a short‑time‑window of recent data for the AI persona?
17:30–24:37
5
What philosophical questions arise about what must survive for a person to live on?
24:37–33:14
6
How do grief experts explain the emotional pull of digital afterlives?
33:14–38:41
7
What ethical and legal concerns surround consent and digital “zombies”?
38:41–45:47
8
What might the future look like for AI‑driven digital immortality?
45:47–52:52