This month I’m delighted to hand the blog over to my husband, Justin Eisinga. Justin is wise and thoughtful, and in his role as Compassionate Care Response Specialist for Karis Disability Services, he’s thinking particularly deeply these days about how we process grief and loss. I was moved by this reflection and am grateful to share it here.

“OpenAI Has Gone Rogue”

“The AI Collapse Nobody is Ready For”

“AI’s new tower of babel risks global social collapse”

You may have read headlines like these over the past few months, clenching your jaw as you scroll. For many of us, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence provokes a pendulum swing between dread, anger, and outright denial. I find myself frustrated that our collective future feels as though it’s being steered by detached tech executives, and I’m  struggling to stay hopeful enough to get through the work week. 

I resist the despair by filling my spare time with enjoyable activities and spending time with friends. Amid all of that, I feel sadness about an unknown future that will (most likely) look nothing like I ever imagined it would. In truth, this experience has a name: grief. And it’s an experience that, among many aspects of human life, is being confronted by artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Virginia shared their findings related to new technology driven by AI that they claim would soften the blow of bereavement. Researcher Renee Cummings suggested that in the future, “griefbots” or “digital memorial agents” would help people stay connected to their loved ones after their departure. These agents collect data from a person’s digital archives and can replicate the way a person writes and speaks. In turn, the grieving person can interact with their loved one whom they miss and whom they are grieving.

There are obvious concerns about the development of these technologies, including how a person’s consent is respected after their death. I’m more interested in the way these technologies would complicate the grieving process, freezing the bereaved in an artificial relationship, refusing to honour the threshold of death.

According to Kimberly D. Acquaviva, a professor of nursing at the same university and a critic of these technologies, “A fundamental aspect of the human experience is loving someone deeply. Inextricably intertwined with loving someone deeply, however, is grieving when that person dies.”

We have much to grieve about the way we will grieve in the future if this technology takes hold. This technology is attempting to eliminate pain and discomfort from our lives. As a Christian, this impulse strikes me not only as futile, but also as spiritually hollow. It is precisely within grief and vulnerability that we encounter mercy and grace. 

I see this reality play out in my work supporting people with disabilities through crisis and loss. Recently, I met with one of the people we support to talk about a double loss: the death of their grandparent and the death of a key support worker from their home. 

Had I introduced this person to the idea that they could hear their grandparents voice again and even have a full-length conversation with them, I would have brought confusion and complication into their grieving process. Their intellectual disability already poses challenges in their understanding of space and time. Their grief must be tended to and processed at a different pace.

 In sitting with them and talking about what has been lost, we shared a graced moment in time. We were simply two people who did not know each other holding space for sorrow. I call these sacred encounters, and they cannot be automated or optimized.

I learned this years ago as I observed my grandma’s abilities and cognition decline at the hands of Alzheimer’s disease. As a teenager, I would ride my bike across town to visit with grandma in her nursing home. Even though she wouldn’t remember my name, I would sit and eat lunch with her. Complicated as they are, these are good memories.  

After her death, we went through all the ancient motions. A wake, a funeral, and a burial. There was a finality to the process, and I believe there needed to be. Had I tried to conjure a digital phantom of her voice to listen to on my phone, I would have been avoiding the truth: death had consumed her.

Yet I believe death does not have the final word. That conviction doesn’t mean that I want to avoid the reality of death. My faith rests in the eventual restoration of all things and the resurrection of the dead. Resurrection demands that the dead are truly dead. 

To outsource memory and presence to an algorithm at the moment of loss is to demand that artificial intelligence perform a cheap counterfeit of resurrection.

How then, should we cultivate a space for holy grief in the age of AI quick-fixes?

Such cultivation  doesn’t necessarily mean boycotting every AI incursion into our lives, although we should give thought to our limits. Rather, we should be intentional with our time,sitting at bedsides, cooking a meal for someone, and giving space for silence instead of quick fixes. It means holding wakes, digging graves, and being brave enough to mourn what is passing away rather than asking a machine to help us numb the ache.

Grief matters because what we lost was real. When we refuse shortcuts and we simply sit with the ache of an empty chair or a buried friend, we accept our place in the world. We admit that we are finite, and that the people we love don’t belong to a machine. They belong to God.

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*Painting is “Death in the Sickroom,” Edvard Munch, 1893

Justin Eisinga holds an MA in Theology from Canadian Mennonite University and a Graduate Certificate in Religion, Peace & Conflict from St. Stephen’s University. He has worked in non-profit leadership and coaching, spiritual care, and hospitality. He works as the Compassionate Care Response Specialist for Karis Disability Ministries, coming alongside communities of people with and without disabilities as they experience transition, loss, and grief. Justin lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his fabulous wife, Laura, dog Ruby, and cats Flora and Finley.