Should Jews use artificial intelligence to bring back the dead?

Imagine that your parent dies suddenly. You were very close; the death comes as a shock. You mourn the lost relationship, and you mourn the relationships that your kids will never get to know.

As you navigate the stages of grief, you decide to make a little detour. You collect your parent’s digital presence — all the text messages, videos, audio clips, everything — and send it off to a company for processing. In a week, you receive a link to a bespoke piece of software: a parent simulation. It sounds like them, and says the things that they would have said.

This is already possible. In a recent episode of my podcast, Belief in the Future, I profiled a man who created an AI simulation of his father so that his children might one day know their grandfather. While his simulation is relatively crude — it’s essentially a chatbot — more advanced models are on the way. In China, one company is already working on models that incorporate video and audio, allowing a person to talk to a deceased relative as if on Zoom.

The technology isn’t commercially available in America just yet, but after years of science fiction depictions and advances in artificial intelligence it is now close. From a technical perspective, current machine learning algorithms are more than capable of pulling it off.

Since most Americans have vast archives of their interactions with others — emails, texts, audio files, videos — it isn’t hard to imagine a world where companies offer to process a recently deceased’s digital footprint. Using all of that info, artificial intelligence could create a facsimile of the deceased’s personality. Friends and family could use a chatbot to have conversations with the dearly departed.

An ethical quandary

So, should you do this?

Of all the moral questions about AI that get passed around these days, I like this one the best — not because it’s the most important, but because it’s rare to see a tech ethics question that doesn’t feel like it’s effectively been decided for you by forces out of your control.

If you’re a professor, for example, you didn’t really get to choose whether AI would transform your assignments; if you’re a teenager, you didn’t really get to decide whether your social life would be entirely intertwined with your phone. Death rituals, by contrast, are varied and deeply personal. Just as a family in mourning decides whether to bury or cremate and what kind of casket to use, they will now be given the choice of how they wish to remember.

What does Judaism say about digital duplicates of the dead? Nothing and everything.

Let’s just get this out of the way: if you’re looking for a microwavable, ready-to-eat Jewish response to this problem from somewhere in the back of our collective religious freezer, you’re not going to find one. Sure, I could talk about the biblical prohibition on necromancy — but if we’re being honest, is that actually compelling?

Judaism’s antiquity and deep wisdom do not imply that it has already solved every scenario that humanity will ever throw at it. In fact, overconfidence that the tradition has it all figured out is a great way to ensure that we never tackle a big new problem ever again. It’s vital to acknowledge that we don’t have it all figured out.

At the same time, the Jewish tradition could not be better situated to weigh in on this question — because while Judaism has no specific wisdom on this topic, the Jewish tradition as a whole is constantly and permanently engaged in conversation with its own dead past. This is, more or less, exactly what we call “Torah study.”

Spend an hour in a typical study hall at a yeshiva and you’ll see people create conversations between figures from late antique Palestine, medieval North Africa, early modern Europe and contemporary America. What’s more, many of the texts are themselves conversations between the dead: the Talmud is a weave of centuries of imagined rabbinic dialogues, and the Bible may be something similar. The Jewish tradition’s insistence that the past accompany us into the future is the single most important feature of our approach to the modern world.

Of course, Judaism tends to speak to some of its dead more than others. Dead men are everywhere; dead women, not so much until quite recently. Powerful and influential figures, too, are overrepresented in Judaism’s resurrections of its own past because preserving ideas used to be the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful. Judaism, like modern death simulations, can only ever provide a window onto lost worlds.

A way to seek closure

It’s precisely because of this hard limitation that Judaism’s conversations with its own past are ultimately about the present and future. Our imperfect attempts to converse with the past are supposed to inform who we are today; they’re not supposed to return us to eras gone by.

Those who would simulate the dead would do well to adopt the same approach. Deep in grief, it is understandable that a person would want a dead relative to continue being a presence in one’s life. The problem is that a vivid simulation could be used to pretend that the death never really happened at all; they can permit a person to stay in a reality that is ultimately disconnected from the one where death is a fact of life.

We can empathize with this desire, but I think we understand that it is ultimately an unhealthy way to grapple with death.

But, as the Jewish tradition of Torah study itself showcases, simulations of the past need not be about staying there; instead, they can give us what we need to move forward with our lives. A person seeking closure after the sudden death of a friend, for example, might just want one more conversation. A person who lost a parent might want to give her own kids a window into what their grandfather was like. Someone commemorating a sibling’s yahrzeit might make an annual pilgrimage to his grave — or maybe she’ll sit down at the kitchen table with a tablet and spend an hour seeped in nostalgia.

Death simulations, like Torah study itself, are best used as imperfect attempts to navigate an imperfect past on a journey into an uncharted future. To paraphrase the Kotzker Rebbe, an 18th century Hasidic rabbi: it’s good to resurrect the dead, but it’s even better to resurrect the living.