The death of the woman he loved was too much. Could he speak to her one last time through AI?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/

A 33-year-old freelance writer, Joshua had existed in quasi-isolation for years before the pandemic, confined by bouts of anxiety and depression. Once a theater geek with dreams of being an actor, he supported himself by writing articles about D&D and selling them to gaming sites.

Many days he left the apartment only to walk his dog, Chauncey, a black-and-white Border collie. Usually they went in the middle of the night, because Chauncey tended to get anxious around other dogs and people. They would pass dozens of dark, silent, middle-class homes. Then, back in the basement, Joshua would lay awake for hours, thinking about Jessica Pereira, his ex-fiancee.

Jessica had died eight years earlier, at 23, from a rare liver disease. Joshua had never gotten over it, and this was always the hardest month, because her birthday was in September. She would have been turning 31.

(snip)

There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief. How many survivors would gladly experiment with a technology that lets them pretend, for a moment, that their dead loved one is alive again — and able to text?

This long read is fascinating, deeply heartbreaking and hopeful. Our culture and society are terrible about dealing with death, and we treat loneliness as a personal moral failure that some people deserve, but I hope this story was as healing to Joshua as it was written.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Kicking in case you need a Sunday-morning read.