Dr Elaine Kasket’s in Time: Grief and Technology

Cyberpsychologist and author Dr Elaine Kasket features in a major TIME investigation into one of the most profound and unsettling frontiers of artificial intelligence: the digital resurrection of the dead, and what it means for those of us still living.

The piece opens with a striking observation from Kasket: the dead have never been this talkative before. Between the vast traces people leave online and the growing ability to digitise letters, photographs, and personal records, we now have access to more digital remains than at any previous point in history, and the technology to animate them in ways that are, in Kasket's words, functionally indistinguishable from the real thing.

But Kasket's contribution to the TIME article is not simply to marvel at what is now possible. It is to interrogate what it costs us. As human memory is already hallucinatory and reconstructive, she asks whether the fiction generated by a machine is any more damaging than the fiction we already construct inside our own heads, and concludes that the answer depends entirely on what function it serves.

Her deeper concern is with what happens when we consistently outsource grief to technology. Kasket warns that if all the difficulty, mess, and pain of human relationships can be smoothed away by digital recreations, we risk becoming brittle, ill-equipped to cope with life's inevitable and unpredictable losses. Pathologising the natural impermanence of human life, she argues, is a direction we should approach with great caution.

Kasket has spent over two decades researching what happens when death meets the digital world, and her perspective in the TIME piece reflects that depth of experience: clear-eyed, compassionate, and alert to the difference between technologies that genuinely support the bereaved and those that simply defer the reckoning.