Texts From the Deceased

Like many of you, I have a family group message that has been ongoing for years. Almost all of us have iPhones, so we can name the group and set a photo for it. The photo for this family group is of Craig, my wife’s dad. He passed away last year. Every time the group sends a message, I see the blue dot next to his face. I truly love how it reminds me of him and keeps his wonderful life at the forefront of my mind. It was around his death that I started writing daily. Something woke up in me.

Each week, my wife experiences events and memories that bring her to tears. She is still mourning him. I think it is wonderful every time she has these moments. I really think we should never stop thinking of the dead, especially the primary members of our family.

What inspired me to think of a product was seeing these texts continually pop up with his face on them. I can’t help but wonder if he were to show up in my messages with a fun joke or poem or just a “Hi Scotty, what you and Nat doing today.”

We have enough tech right now to create chatbots of our favorite people and even mimic their voice. Most of these impersonations seem silly because we would much prefer hearing from the actual person rather than a bot. But, when it comes to the deceased, we can’t get text from them (that I currently know of). Perhaps we should have the option to keep a deceased family member's phone number active, paying the necessary fees plus an AI fee, to keep their presence around a bit longer.

This virtual presence could reach out to you on a hard day or be there for you when you feel like no one else can understand your perspective. You could share photos with this person and have them comment and heart the photo. Maybe the deceased phone number can leave voicemail once in a while.

I know many of you think this is creepy or think of Black Mirror episodes like this one, but think of how some people could really benefit. How about someone who is 80 and very lonely after losing a spouse? How about a young grandchild who is happy to get a birthday wish from Grandpa?

Let's conduct a small poll on this idea:

Thanks for reading. I really have been putting a good portion of my time into making content and the support is felt. Let’s keep building a future we want to live in. Ciao

SP

Here is an ad for EverEcho™ a new company that GPT made when I fed this article to the model and prompted DALL-E to make an ad for the company. We are so close to making this real.