The Ghosts in Our Phones

About 15 years ago, I realized I was never going to delete my dad's contact from my phone. He died in 2007, and I think he was the first person I knew whose contact card just stayed there after he was gone. I knew the number wouldn't reach him anymore, and I knew that if I sent something to the address, he wasn't there to receive it, but for whatever reason I couldn't bring myself to delete it. I have plenty of things that belonged to him, including his favorite coffee mug, and there are plenty of things I gave away, but the contact in my phone was different. It was the one thing I couldn't let go of, even though “keeping it” was very irrational. For a long time, this reminder of who he was and/or how I could reach him sat heavily on me; this strange inability to delete him, in a way, from my life, which was becoming more and more lived in my phone.

Around 2012 or 2013, I started giving a talk called, "Someday You Will Marry Your Smartphone," in which I argued that smartphones were becoming so intimately enmeshed in our lives that we would eventually export their operating systems into robotized bodies, and that we would find those bodies (those beings) more intellectually, socially, physically, sexually, and emotionally satisfying than any human relationship. So why wouldn't we marry them? I still feel that way, and AI is the "operating system" I imagined would handle the intellectual companion part of the equation.

When I was proclaiming, “Someday you will marry your smartphone,” our phones were quietly turning into the repositories of our lives. They know so much about us, they hold so much of us, and somewhere in all of that I started talking about this thing people do where they can't bring themselves to delete the contacts of people who have died. I referred to them as the ghosts in our phones, because that is what they are. They are presences you don't think about until you're scrolling and one of them surfaces, and you feel that odd mixture of grief and despair, and you sit there not knowing whether you should delete the contact, knowing it's almost a little silly that you won't.

It was only later that I learned there was a name for this. These are what people call continuing bonds, and the things we hold onto are linking objects, and humans have been doing this forever. We keep memory objects and keepsakes: a wristwatch, Mom’s recipe box, somebody's wedding ring, a favorite coffee mug. We keep handwritten notes or an old sweater because they matter to us as a visible representation of the memory, and in that sense the phone has become one more container for it, a way of maintaining attachment, a bridge between who we were and who they were and where we are now, a kind of physical anchor for a relationship we can no longer experience directly but that still exists in our minds and in our souls.

It's a little crazy when you reflect on it. The contact card in the phone has no value. The number connects to no one. The address, even though it still physically exists, doesn't reach the person it belonged to. And yet it is so significant that we can't give it up. To me, that is a symbol of our humanity, our ability to carry our past relationships forward in our memory and in our heart, to honor the dead by holding onto their memory because it's all we have left of them. It feels like a distinctly human thing to do.

What I worry about is what happens as AI becomes more embedded in our lives, because it opens up the promise of taking those memories and animating them. I think about things like grief bots, which I plan to write more about another time, and this idea of an entity that comes between you and the linking object, that inserts itself into the continuing bond. For some people, I imagine it could be an important link, something genuinely meaningful, and I honestly don't even know what to call it. But it also worries me, because it is a non-human. It is an other. It isn't a thing at all. It is code, it is algorithms, and yet it is working its way into some of the most intimate parts of the human experience, into our grief and our loss, and that just feels unnatural to me. I wonder if it ends up with too much power over a process that should be lived in solitude and experienced personally, not laid bare for the algorithm to analyze.

It’s ok for grief and loss to have profound moments of solitude and to be experienced personally and not requiring intervention. As much as we want to hold onto some connection to what we've lost, the letting go is part of grieving too, not the opposite of the bond but part of how we honor it.

A robot can't feel nostalgia. It can't sit with the ache of missing someone, or the bittersweet pull of a memory it can never get back. We can and we do feel those things, and as much as it hurts, that ache is one of the most human things about us. Grief is the same. It belongs to us, and I don't think we should be in such a hurry to hand it over to the machine, no matter its shape or form.

Keep evolving and stay human.

[ * _ * ]