Key Points
- Death robots and robot funerals
- Digital Afterlife and AI
- Saving a seat at the table for Death
For as long as humans have tried to exert control over where, when and how we die, technology has played a role in death culture. We use it to improve our quality of life as we get old, and we look to science - and sometimes science fiction - to explore ways in which we can defeat death itself. While developments like palliative medicine have become normal as a way to improve one’s quality of life, others like digital clones may challenge our sense of mortality and morality.
Different cultures also harness death tech in very different ways. For example, what can we learn from Japan’s energetic pursuit of innovation in the death sector? Perhaps that sentient robots are the future of at-home hospice care. But how would you feel if your family arranged a robot to officiate your funeral? And do androids grieve electric tears?
We don’t shy away from the big questions here at Grave Matters.
In this wide-ranging conversation, doyen of death tech, Dr Hannah Gould, helps us to understand the complex forces exerting pressure on the deathcare sector. We talk cultural anthropology and the concept of ‘peak death’, and Hannah steers us through the ethical minefield of managing someone’s legacy and digital life after they die. We even touch on what it means to save a seat at the table for Death.
You've got people who are using technology to try and build better deaths and end-of-life experiences for people. And then you've got people who are using technology to try and deny death or fight death or beat death.Dr Hannah Gould
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us understand both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: Dr Hannah Gould
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting . Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
Content warning: This episode mentions death and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Nadine: Anthony Levin. Hello.
Anthony: Hi, Nadine. Jonas Brothers Cohen.
Nadine: Amazing.
Anthony: Nadine, you worked at Google before it was cool, so I'm guessing you like technology.
Nadine: I would say I worked at Google when it was cool. And yes, yes I do.
Anthony: Oh touché.
Because today we're gonna be talking about technology and death, and we'll be joined by doyenne of death tech, Dr Hannah Gould.
But first, can you and I do a little hypothetical?
Nadine: Sure.
Anthony: OK, so let's say your cat Blanche Devereaux died tomorrow. Like you wake up and she's on the floor…
Nadine: Please don't do this to me.
Anthony: Rigor mortis.
Nadine: She's never gonna die.
Anthony: She's never dying. But setting aside your immobilizing grief, could you replace her with a robo-cat?
Nadine: I'm gonna need a little bit more information.
Anthony: So instead of going to the pet store or a pound and/or a special place that has cats that are sourced epically, you go to Robo-Cat Land and you get a robot cat and it it's the replacement Blanche, it's Blanche Devereaux.
Nadine: Is it furry?
Anthony: It can be, yes.
Nadine: Does it purr?
Anthony: It purrs, it scratches people's bags - not that that happened to me.
Nadine: Will it hurt if I sleep spooning it?
Anthony: Yes.
Nadine: No, then.
Anthony: All the things that Blanche would do, it does.
Nadine: No.
Anthony: No, you wouldn't?
Nadine: No.
Anthony: Why not?
Nadine: I don't want to get hurt while I spoon my robo-cat.
Anthony: OK, take the hurt out.
Nadine: Yes, sure, give me a right back.
Anthony: Look, there's no right answer here, but I guess…
Nadine: BLANCHE DEVEREAUX-BOT!
Anthony: Well done.
Nadine: Thank you.
Anthony: Yeah, I'm not the only one that makes the dad jokes.
Nadine: Usually you are.
Anthony: Usually I am.
I guess the point here is we’re gonna explore some of these themes in today's episode.
For as long as humans have tried to exert control over where, when and how we die, technology has played some part in death culture. But how are 21st-century technologies like AI and chatbots disrupting the way we remember the dead, how we plan funerals, and how we care for the dying?
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Our next guest has all the answers. Dr Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist. She has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Science from Oxford University. Yeah, she's a bit smart.
She also holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne, where she is a member of the Death Tech Research Team which studies death, technology and society, and she's currently the President of the Australian Death Studies Society.
Hannah Gould, welcome to the show.
Hannah: Hi, thank you for having me on.
Anthony: So you call yourself a cultural anthropologist - can you start by finishing this sentence for our listeners? Cultural anthropology is...
Hannah: Cultural anthropology is the attempt to see the world from another person's point of view, and through doing so to reflect critically on your own position in the world.
So we often talk about the “familiar strange” in anthropology. So anthropology is the attempt to make that which first might seem super weird or odd or strange, to make it familiar, to understand the logic of it. To understand why people do it and what it means to them.
And then, through doing that in the reverse, to make that which we seem familiar, normal, ordinary, taken for granted about our own experience, to make it seem strange, to reflect critically on it and think, hey, it's really odd how we're doing this and ask questions about it.
And I suppose through that process we can then maybe decide to change some of the things that we take for granted or do every day.
Anthony: I find myself strangely fascinated by this, “making unfamiliar” process. Maybe I'm not alone? Nadine is nodding.
Nadine: Scribbling some notes about it right now.
Anthony: Yeah. Does that mean I should have become a cultural anthropologist or are we all just a little bit of that inside?
Hannah: Well, I mean I think I think everyone should become a cultural anthropologist.
Anthony: Yes, you're a little biased.
Hannah: I'm a little biased, no, but I think everyone can appreciate the tools of cultural anthropology, and I think they're probably lots of great writers and storytellers and thinkers who have a similar approach to the world.
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Nadine (VO): Before we got too deep into the anthropological weeds on the links between death and technology, we wanted to know - what was it that led Hannah to study death in the first place?
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Hannah: Umm, I mean, I think for me there's like personal reasons and then there's academic reasons, and they always overlap. One was, my dad died when I was 22/23 - around there - and it was one of those like 1% of the 1%.
Like, he had a skin cancer that very rarely turns malignant and it turned malignant. And then he, you know, was in a coma and then he got pneumonia. Like, it's this kind of story of everything kind of going wrong.
And then there were this kind of questions that it brought up that surprised me. Questions about like, what tombstone and what headstone? And all of the tombstones and the headstones and the caskets had these really weird names that were like, they were almost like paint colours, you know, like morning spring and you're like, who…
Nadine: Dishwashing detergents.
Hannah: Exactly, and the kind of question I asked was like, well, who decided to name it that? Right?
So because I've always been interested in material culture and objects and things, I was like, who is the person that designed our death? Who is the person that designed this way of mourning for us?
And at the same time, I was kind of struggling with that and these kind of questions, I was, you know, doing some work in Japan and Japanese young people were also kind of struggling with their tradition of Buddhist ancestor worship, which seems like to me to be an awesome system. I was like, why aren't we doing that? And they were saying, I don't like this, you know, I wanna do something different.
And so I kind of became interested in this kind of question of people who feel a disconnect with their systems of death and dying, and how they negotiate that. And I suppose that led to the academic, which is like, anthropologists are so fascinated in human diversity, but then also in unity, right? Like what brings us together as humanity? And then what are the differences?
And death is the uber problem. So much of humanity is our experience of mortality, which is one of the few things that we all do. There are very few things that we all do but we do it in such extraordinarily different ways, you know. Even if we think, oh, everyone cremates in the same way - no, they don't. Everyone buries in the same way - no, they don't. Like there's so much diversity in how we respond to death that it becomes this fascinating problem of, like, what really sets us apart and what brings us together?
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Anthony: You are specifically interested in the area of death tech, which has always sounded to me like an episode of Black Mirror but is actually short for death technology.
What are some of the major trends in death tech right now?
Hannah: So technology can impact death all along the kind of timeline, from the end of life through to memorialization. And I suppose at different stages in that long timeline we have different kinds of intervention.
So probably one of the major ones that we perhaps don't often think about as death tech is actually medical technology. So whether that be technologies for extending people's lives or technologies that actually rewrite what we think of as the line between life and death.
So you know, we often talk about, when we think about the history of death and dying, we talk about how, you know, that definition, that line changed from things like the last breath to when we were able to detect a heartbeat; then the last heartbeat to this emerging idea of brain death and being in a coma, and what does it then mean if our lives are only sustained by machines. So there's this kind of rewriting of this idea.
So medical technology is one huge area that yes, it is in the health sphere, but also is fundamentally a death technology.
Moving along then, I suppose along that line we have a lot of technologies and a lot of energy at the moment emerging around the idea of the handling and disposal of human remains. So globally we we have kind of what we call the Big Two: burial and cremation. And burial and cremation, you know, the majority of people worldwide use them and for many hundreds of years, they've been so super dominant in many different various forms and different expressions of those two technologies.
But there’s kind of this emerging area in our of rival technologies, of new ways of handling bodies, whether that be through something like alkaline hydrolysis, which is a kind of water/acid-based technology for transforming bodies into bones...
Anthony: Is that the same as aquamation?
Hannah: That is the same as it's sometimes called aquamation or resumation. This is kind of an interesting conversation, I mean, there's lots of different branding, kind of marketing moves, around these technologies to try and work out how best to sell them to the public. And also things like human composting, recompose, those kind of areas. So there's also kind of technology, energies and innovation happening around the body.
And then I suppose the third and final major area of death technology is around kind of commemorative spaces, particularly the use of online or AI or robotic tools to enliven the dead, to keep their memory alive, to allow them to communicate with the living, or simply to allow people to mourn and memorialise in ways that are more perhaps convenient for them or they feel close to the dead through doing so. So everything from, you know, Zoom use at funerals through to kind of holograms and AI and more experimental technologies.
This is probably like, looking at the broad landscape, they're probably the three main areas of technology as it intersects with death.
But I mean, for me at least, technology is everything from a coffin through to a robot. Right? Just because one is higher tech than the other, they're both technologies. So really it's fundamentally about the kind of material objects that we use to mediate or negotiate death.
***
Anthony: And Hannah, how is the industry changing?
Hannah: So the death care industry is an odd duck in many ways, particularly in Australia, there are lots of different parts of it, and not all of those parts necessarily talk to each other or necessarily see themselves as part of the same industry or sector.
So when I talk about the death care sector, I'm really talking about everyone in that holistic view. Everyone from kind of end-of-life workers through to commemoration and memorial. And a lot of them are really being challenged by new technological innovations.
Some of that is to do with COVID and the changes they've had to make in response to social distancing restrictions. I mean massive kind of requirements to upskill and become more high tech and tech is obviously then leading to a number of disruptions in the sector as well.
It's very easy for you now, if you're a family with someone who's died, to jump on Google and look for a review of your funeral home, right? To compare different funeral homes. And that just wasn't something that happened for most of the history of the funeral sector. I mean, people went to the same funeral home that their family, that their community had always gone to. And, you know, it was all kind of word of mouth.
Which is not to say that word of mouth is still not important, but there are many ways then, that their relationship with customers is being changed through technology, whether that's bringing an iPad to that initial meeting and filling out all the forms online, or people wanting PowerPoint slides and music and high tech, you know, lighting shows at the funeral.
So it's it's a sector that's kind of in one way being, you know, challenged by all these emerging technologies. But then I think also it’s a sector that's fundamentally pretty resistant to change. Death tends to be quite conservative for a number of reasons. One of them is that usually for kind of most relatively privileged populations at least, we tend to bury our elders. So when you're making decisions about funerals, it's not just what I would like, but what would grandma like, right? And so that can lead to conservatism.
And then there's also the fact that most people in their lifetime, again, most people in a privileged position, will only organise maybe one or two funerals. So it's not something that you really prepare for and it's not something that you kind of repeat very frequently. And because of that, in this kind of time of immense emotional stress and kind of a ticking clock - you know, you've gotta get this done - people tend to revert to more conservative choices in general. You know, we'll just do it how it's always been done.
So because of that, I think even though the industry is being challenged and disrupted by all these new technologies, in many ways they're also pretty wary of them, and I think also have gotten by not responding. You know, they've kind of been OK by being conservative and selling the standard model for a very long time.
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Nadine (VO): Is this conservatism playing out in other cultures? We asked Hannah to talk about her time doing her PhD in Japan.
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Hannah: Why did I pick Japan? Well, it helped that I spoke Japanese. No, I mean, I began to be really interested in Japanese death rituals and death care for a number of reasons.
I mean, one was that Japan is leading the world, I suppose in a kind of negative way, you know, kind of aging population and questions around how the living might care, and not only for the elderly, but also to care for the dead.
Australia also has an aging population and perhaps we will reach this kind of period slightly later, so I think they say now 2044 is the kind of era of a “peak death” for Australia, when our baby boomers age and reach the average age of mortality.
Anthony: Can you just explain that for listeners? What do you mean by peak death? Like the best death possible?
Hannah: Yeah, it’s peak death, man.
Nadine: Death on mountains?
Hannah: So if we look at, you know, if you look at those kind of, maps of the population you look at, the kind of, I suppose, waves of fertility that happened throughout generations, so we think classically of the baby boomer generation as this big generation. I think millennials have just overtaken them in the number of people.
But that wave of fertility will eventually lead to a wave of mortality, as it were. Because you know, we have this kind of upper limit, as it were. But you know, at least an average of when most people die. And for baby boomers, you know, that's reaching around the 80s.
Australia has quite a high average age of mortality and because of that, we can then look at those demographics and think, OK, this super huge population in our society will reach the average age of mortality around this year. And so what we're going to have at that time is more people dying than ever before. And so we have to think about how our death care systems are set up to deal with that kind of sudden peak death moment.
Nadine: Is this the silver tsunami I have heard of in other conversations?
Hannah: Yeah, it does connect to the silver tsunami. Yeah, in the sense of this kind of aging population. It also, interestingly enough, kind of affects what we might think of as the kind of timelines or the kind of pattern of our life and death.
So not only do we have this kind of coming age of peak death in the future, but actually also because how we're dying, has changed, it kind of affects the last decades of our lives. So scholars in death studies, we'll talk about the contemporary era as this era of prolonged dwindling, which is another interesting term.
But basically, we used to have a lot more sudden deaths, right? And so you'd have, you know, sudden deaths in war or sudden deaths because of illnesses that couldn't be treated. But because our medical technologies are getting better, people are living longer.
But that also means that the last maybe 10/15/20 years of our lives are lived in a condition in which we might need to rely on other people for support, right? So whether that's aged care, care for dementia or Alzheimer's, experiences of life that require a little bit of support from a welfare state. And so how we die is changing at the same time as we're going to have more people dying.
So you've got this kind of peak death, people dying, but also 10/20 years before that they've also needed a lot more support around end-of-life and aging care. So it's a kind of different transformation, as it were, of how Australians die and therefore where our systems of aged care and death need to be in order to respond to that.
***
Anthony: This seems like the right moment to talk about robots.
Hannah: It is the right moment to talk about robots.
Nadine: When is not the right moment to talk about robots? That’s what I want to know.
Hannah: Right?
Anthony: As a friend of mine would say: Get to the effing robots
Hannah: Get to the effing robots.
Anthony: Beautiful.
So yeah, let's talk about robots.
Hannah: Let's talk about robots.
Anthony: How all good conversations start.
I mean this issue of peak death and decades of care and the need and the dependency of the aging population, those all do point to pressures on the welfare state and also direct our attention to innovation.
And Japan is a place that, you might say, is leading the world in the use of robots in death care. Why is that?
Hannah: So Japan, as I said, is far more along the line as it were in this kind of aging population, aging society and they also have a kind of difficulty of a really low birth rate, low fertility. And what that means is basically, they don't necessarily have enough young people, young people of working age, who want to but also have been employed to care for elderly people, right? So you have a real challenge, this massive challenge, around finding enough aged care workers.
And one of the ways that countries solve this problem around the world is through migration. So we often see in Australia, for example, we have a lot of, you know, nursing care and aged care from recent migrants to the country. And certainly, Japan has pursued that to a certain extent. But because the Japanese cultural framework and, I suppose, government policies have also been to be very strict on migration, you don't have a lot of external migration, certainly not to the extent that we have in Australia, for example.
One of the other pushes has been to use robotics or use robot systems in aged care and death care. So you know, if we can't find the workers, maybe the robots will help us to care for our elderly.
It has had mixed success.
Anthony: Yeah.
Hannah: I can talk you through some of the robots.
Anthony: Please, delve into that. Talk about the robotics, the robot assistants. What do they look like? Are we talking kind of a Blade Runner? Or is it more like R2D2?
Hannah: Oh, definitely more R2D2.
So, there are two categories, broadly, of robots that are used in this kind of arena. And I will direct everyone's attention as well, as a follow-up, to an extraordinary ethnography that's just been published called Robots Won't Save Japan by James Adrian Wright.
Nadine: Also my new band name.
Hannah: That's an excellent band name, I will say.
So he discusses there being kind of different types of robots. So you have physical robots that are there actually to assist people in moving the elderly. So, you know, similar to how we have kind of lifts and hoists that are used in healthcare, in aged care with getting people out of bed, getting dressed - those kinds of physical tasks that require manual labour, right? They’re one kind of school, I suppose, or one kind of type of robot that has been trialled in these areas.
The other kind of, and I would say more interesting in some ways, robots are social robots - social or emotional robots. These are cute and fluffy or they have big eyes and cute faces and little names, very much drawing on that anime character tradition; like WALL-E, the WALL-E tradition.
And they are more focused on solving issues of loneliness or distress or boredom frankly, in aged care institutions. There's a very famous robot called Paro, who is a seal. And he's a little furry white seal that you can hug and he will, you know, flap his tail and flap his flippers and nestle into you. I mean, you could just get a cat, I suppose.
Nadine: Doesn't need to be fed, probably.
Hannah: He doesn't need to be fed.
Nadine: Or litter changed.
Hannah: But you know, he does need to be charged.
Often, what we find actually is that these robots end up creating work in many situations. You know you have to bring the manual care robot into the room and set them up and line them up correctly with the person you're trying to lift, and that can actually create a lot of labour around caring not just for the person, but then also caring for the robot.
And similarly, these kinds of social robots are the ones you might have seen like Pepper the robot, who is a robot from SoftBank who's a social robot. They're supposed to have a personality and be able to interact with you and give you advice and all these kinds of things. I mean, they have been used in things like exercise classes or singing songs or entertainment, kind of arenas. But they also, you know, require to be set up and cared for and charged and all this kind of thing.
So both of those kinds of, I suppose, two types of robots that the physical manual labour robots and the social/emotional robots have been trialled but they have found mixed success, I would say.
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Anthony (VO): In popular culture, Westerners tend to see Japan as a heady mix of time-honoured tradition and eccentric futurism. But what can we learn from the way in which Japan has embraced innovation in death care?
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Hannah: I think most Japanese people have a very different relationship to robots than Australians. They're far more familiar seeing these kinds of advanced robotic machines, not only in their homes but in their workplaces. And there's a different kind of cultural imagining around them through popular media that will probably endear people to robots a little bit more.
But at the same time, I think it is perhaps more existentially an interesting question of why we have delegated care for our elderly and dying and dead to robots as opposed to humans, and what maybe that says about us, Japan or Australia frankly, about who we care for and who has to do the caring.
Nadine: So do you think we should embrace robot death care in Australia? Or should we instead find ways to improve care by humans?
Hannah: Yeah, I don't think that robots are incapable of providing care. I think the kind of human/non-human divide is so often challenged in so many ways. And I think always when I think about this, I think of the number of people who choose to die at home predominantly so they can be with their dogs or their cats. Right?
So we think animals and non-humans, whether that be material culture like, you know, having your beds, your bedroom, your, you know, your objects around you on one end of the scale or is it, you know robotics and the other end of the scale are really important and help people craft meaningful deaths.
I think when it comes to the question of labour, though, I worry that in asking robots to do this care, we devalue the human workers who work in this space and the kind of extraordinary care they provide and our really strong moral responsibility to care for them also.
Anthony: Yeah, absolutely.
Nadine: I think in all of this, though, I just wanted to bring up the history of medical sciences, the sciences in general, have been towards like, creating longer lives, making us live longer, we all want to live longer.
And anyone who has experienced someone, as you touched on before, with dementia, with a long-term terminal illness, with you know, a slow dying will tell you that it's not quantity, it's not… I don't want to live till 80 if from 60 to 80, my quality of life is terrible.
And I guess I just wanted to gauge your thoughts on that?
Hannah: Yeah, 100%. And it's fascinating cause I think anyone who has cared for somebody with these kinds of, let's call it prolonged dwindling cases, will know that what is death and what is the death of the person and what is the death of the body or the personality can all happen at very different times.
When my father died, the predominant emotion that we all felt was relief. Yeah, because, like, he had been in palliative care for quite a long time. Like, we knew it was gonna happen. And we were sad. And we were grieving, but also if you have these kinds of timelines of people who perhaps have Alzheimer's or dementia for many years and have lost part of their personality or part of their relationship to people, that makes the kind of line around where is life and where is death very challenging.
Something about death and technology that's really interesting is that death and technology intersect in really different ways. It's almost on two axes: you've got death positivity or death denial, right? You've got people who are using technology to try and build better deaths and end-of-life experiences for people.
And then you've got people who are using technology to try and deny death or fight death or beat death, which is what we call techno-salvationism. Like technology will save us. And of all the things that can save us from, death is like the greatest challenge, right?
So if we only invent the best medicine, if we only invent the best robots, then we can beat death. And that certainly is a strain of death tech, but it doesn't take a genius to tell you that the majority of people, if death ever is defeated, are not going to be able to access it, right? And that in the meantime, we could have been using technology to actually help people die better.
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Anthony: I mean, there is certainly a cultural fascination with immortality or beating death. Can you tell us what kind of real-world digital services are out there that are helping us maintain some kind of digital life beyond our physical and spiritual one?
Hannah: Yeah, so when it comes to kind of, life extension technologies or I suppose, these kinds of immortality technologies, as we might say… I mean there's a whole area that looks at the kind of immortality of the body, so cryonics, classic kind of, you know that kind of area: how can we preserve the biology?
There's a different school of thought or, I suppose, a different area of attention that looks at trying to preserve the personality or personhood or consciousness or whatever you might call it of the individual who's died, often through the use of AI, through chatbots in particular.
So there have been many attempts to say if we can feed a kind of AI system and ChatGPT-like system enough data from the person when they were alive. So enough voice recordings, enough kind of details about their life, about their personality, about their likes, their dislikes, then would it be possible to create a reasonable facsimile of them, after they've gone?
So that could be in the form of, you know, a Twitter account that tweets for you after you've died or a chatbot where you could get your say, great, great grandchildren to log on and have a conversation with their ancestor, for example. And you can certainly see the power of it in these kinds of educational settings, right?
And this is all done, obviously, with the permission of the people who are giving me his voices and they've signed up for it and they've said yes, I want to be part of telling this story. I think it becomes more challenging when we think about, you know, questions of who has the right to control your afterlife or your legacy after you've died? And what happens if, you know it damages or diminishes your legacy in some way?
It's a complicated thing. I think it's right that we don't dismiss it wholesale and we kind of think it's all scary and Black Mirror, but it does provoke questions about ethics, right?
Anthony: Well, that's right, I mean, I'm thinking of Microsoft's AI bot Tay, who I think it took Twitter 24 hours to corrupt into a potty-mouthed racist.
Hannah: Which seems slow, frankly.
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Nadine (VO): Hannah explained that how we manage someone's legacy after they die has always raised ethical questions.
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Hannah: You know, the dead are always kind of used and abused by the living, in various different ways. You know, these legacies are always reinvented and changed and remixed in certain ways. But I think there's something about the immediacy of AI, the potential for it to be in someone's voice, in someone's image, that changes the impact a little more for us.
Anthony: With respect to these burgeoning services that might capture our personality or our consciousness, is it still too early to judge whether anyone's going to care about these in a decade? Because the rate of change and technological obsolescence is so fast, how can we know that creating a bot today is not gonna be, you know, in the annals of someone's broken boxed computer in 10 years time?
Hannah: I think this is a really fascinating point because it brings up this whole idea of the actual life or afterlife of technologies themselves, right?
And we invest in these new necro-technologies, these new death tech systems, and sometimes we can become extremely invested in them, you know, giving thousands of hours of content and emotions and stories to them, only for them to go defunct.
And there's been a number of cases of, particularly memorial websites, where people might upload an extraordinary amount of information about their loved one that have been, again, venture capital-backed websites and organizations that promised eternity. I mean, one of them was literally called Eternime, a very famous case. It promised to maintain the likeness, the memories of your deceased loved one forever. And it went broke, you know, and so that data was lost.
And so, you know, that can lead to all these ideas of it's almost, you know, like a second death in a way, right? You've given someone the promise of eternal memory and then you've lost that.
Anthony: Hang on, isn't it in the cloud? Mommy went into the clouds.
Hannah: I mean, everything’s in the cloud. The dead are in the cloud.
Nadine: The cloud, the cloud.
Hannah: But I mean, you know, it could just be a matter of, you know, you have all of the recordings of your mum or dad on a VCR tape and you no longer have a VCR player to to see it, right?
Nadine: I've been meaning to convert a couple of tapes for so long
Anthony: Haven’t we all got a box of tapes that we should convert?
Hannah: Exactly. So VCR tapes degrade or you know, a record can be scratched, or a file can be lost in the cloud, right?
So as soon as you decide to kind of invest the memory, the legacy of the deceased person into a particular technology, you then have to think about the actual life of that technology and how accessible it is and its longevity. How long it can last? Can it be passed down? And that sort of thing.
It's not all doom and gloom, but with all things, it is… In a way, the great thing about engaging with technology is it provokes these deeper questions about death and dying that can be a way into these conversations that people sometimes don't want to have otherwise.
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Anthony: I understand that during your time in Japan, you may have attended some robot funerals. Can you tell us about that?
Hannah: Yes, I went to a funeral that was led by a robot, which is quite interesting. But what I also went to was a series of funerals for robots. Something which, you know, we might think is completely extraordinary and bizarre but it's not so different, I think, from us, for example, having funerals for our pets, which is more and more common these days.
So there's a series of robotic dogs called Aibo which I mean, think of the cute little kind of flippy dog creatures that people had, particularly in the 2000s, two thousand and 2010s and people became very attached to. And as technology moved on again, as the death tech itself died, more and more Aibos started losing their parts, and they couldn't get replacement parts. And Sony no longer made replacement parts for them. And so they died in a sense, they couldn't be used or interacted with anymore.
And so a Buddhist temple decided to hold a large funeral for them. And this, I think, kind of builds into a broader legacy in Japan of what has been called funerals for objects but might be perhaps better translated as like a memorial service or a service of gratitude and thanks for different objects, different materials that have served some well.
It particularly comes from a tradition of trades. So there are funerals for needles by tattoo artists and also seamstresses. So old needles that are too blunt to be used anymore are gathered up and given thanks to. I've seen funerals for tea whisks and funerals for scissors - hairdressers often have funerals for scissors. There are certainly funerals for old eyeglasses by people who want to say thanks for these kinds of technologies, for helping them through life.
And some of this you think, oh you know, and I really don't want to feed into that, you know, wacky Japan stereotype that I think is really easy and obvious. But you know, you think about it in Australia, you know people’s pets or teddy bears or you know, soft toys you had as a kid, you know, all of these things that you form extreme intimate, you know, attachments to.
Nadine: I have written before about the attachment to objects of the dead in a different, not burying the objects themselves, but you know the importance we place on inanimate objects.
Anthony: You said inanimate, but I guess the thing I'm wondering about these robot dogs - did you call them Aibo?
Hannah: Aibo, yeah.
Anthony: Do the families, the bereaved, treat them as inanimate, or is it actually the opposite?
Hannah: No, I mean, I think as an anthropologist, you realise that there are very few, if any, binaries in life, and animacy is certainly one of them. It's definitely a continuum.
And there is certainly a Buddhist or animist tradition in Japan of seeing the material world as enlivened or animated in a way that perhaps we don't usually see in the West, in Australia. so you have far more of these circumstances of objects becoming enlivened. And in fact, there are also historical stories of objects being unruly and becoming alive and running around the house and that kind of background in popular culture.
So I think certainly for people who are engaging in this act of mourning for their robot dogs, no, not at all. I mean, some of them saw them as part of the family. And why wouldn't you mourn the death of someone in your family, whether they be a robot dog or a real dog or a human?
Nadine: Yeah, absolutely.
Hannah: It's not so much I think about their category, as it is about the relationship that you have with them.
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Anthony: Why is it important to set limits on what and who we grieve in ritual ways?
Hannah: I think the thread running throughout our conversation today is kind of this notion of what we call ‘personhood’ in anthropology. So anthropologists don't usually like to talk about, like, individuals or humans or animals because there are so many examples of phenomena that cross those boundaries.
We instead kind of tend to talk about persons or moral persons. So you know, persons are recognised within our social system as having moral obligations towards them and generating moral obligations. That could be a dog, that could be your cat, that could be a human person. That could be an object in a church that's spiritual, that's important. You know, there's all these different things that could fall into the category of person.
And then at the other end of that, there are certain individuals in our society who are not recognised for their personhood. You know, that are incarcerated or that, for example, we diminish the personhood of because of their experiences with Alzheimer's and Dementia, right? We talk about kind of a social death.
Or you know, classically the example of this is, you know, enemies of the state, you know? Outsiders, foreigners who we don't think we have to treat as persons and therefore have often been these kinds of historically horrific cases of the treating of their bodies and not giving them funerals and that sort of thing. You know, Abu Ghraib is the prime example of this.
So you know, who we therefore decide are persons in our moral universe, in a way, is linked to how we treat them in death. So you know moral persons are ones that deserve funerals. In some ways, they are ones that are grievable, right? They are entities that we should grieve for and are allowed to grieve for and we recognise the grief of.
Anthony: I mean, corporations have legal personality and they have obligations to us. And we're all pretty familiar with the ways in which that can play out socially. But we tend not to grieve, say, the death of AltaVista, you know.
Hannah: Yes.
Anthony: Or other now-defunct search engines and forms of tech. But is that changing?
Hannah: Yeah, I don't think corporations yet have reached moral personhood. I think that kind of definition of them as having legal personhood, within the American legal system at least, was kind of highly contested for this very reason, right?
Like a company is an individual legally, but you never hold the door open for a company, right? Like there is a distinction here between what we recognise as a moral person and what the law might recognize as an entity. And it is fascinating to me that fundamentally, so much of that is tied to how we react to the life and death of that.
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Nadine (VO): Thinking about death tech certainly provokes deeper questions about death and dying. Hannah left us with some wise words.
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Hannah: I should be clear because I'm a death studies scholar. Like, I'm not asking everyone to sit down every morning and ponder mortality. I certainly do not do that. But there's a great expression that Zenith Virago, who's an extraordinary death educator based in Byron Bay, once told me.
And she kind of just said, well, what I'm asking for is people to leave death a seat at the table. Right? You know, whenever you get a diagnosis, when something happens in your life, in your every day, you know, there's a table set up for a dinner party with many different friends you might invite, and one of those is death.
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Nadine: So Hannah, what's a good death to you?
Hannah: What a good death is is so, not only idiosyncratic but entrenched in people's culture and religious contexts that try to impose a single model is entirely against the ethos of of what we should be doing in our death care work.
For me, I think I want to have quality of life for as long as possible, in terms of being able to do the things I love, whether that's running and spending time with friends and cooking. And then when I can't do those things, I'd be very happy to go.
I'm definitely going to take up some drinking and hard drugs in the final years. Because why not?
Nadine: Yeah, absolutely.
Hannah: But you know, I don't really want to hang around for much longer than I can't have those things. And, you know, being an academic, when I lose my ability to read and, you know, express myself, then I'm kind of OK to go.
And then all my friends and family should spend all of their money on good red wine and cheese. And that's the ceremony they should have.
Anthony: Well Hannah, thanks so much for being on the show.
Hannah: Thank you so much. And thank you for having this conversation.
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Nadine: So Lev, my friend, what did you take from that?
Anthony: Lots of things. But I think the big theme there was really whether we're comfortable with robots or other machines that might be sentient being involved in death care in some way. Whether that's when we're dying or in the funeral planning process.
That's really interesting to me and honestly, I don't know if I'm comfortable with it because I have no frame of reference for it.
Nadine: Yeah, I'm definitely not comfortable with it yet but I think there will be advances over time and by the time I get to that stage where hopefully, if necessary, that won't be as scary.
Anthony: So we'll be more like Japan and we'll just be comfortable with these things because they'll be more like integrated into our daily life.
Nadine: Yeah, we'll have to be probably.
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Nadine: So thanks again to Dr Hannah Gould. In our next episode, we speak to a former child refugee about trauma, ancestral grief, and finding laughter in unusual places.
Linda Thai: People think of grief as crying and letting go and getting over it. But grief is actually how we remember. It's how we continue a relationship with ourselves with an identity, with a culture. It's how we continue our relationship with people who aren't physically here anymore. It's how we continue a relationship with life-altering, life-shattering experiences.
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If this episode has raised issues for you and you'd like to seek mental health support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit .
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Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail audio@sbs.com.au.
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