Say goodbye to your Ouija and séance rituals, you can now contact beyond the grave with technology. Sounds a little too good to be true right? Well technology has created convincing digital surrogates of the nonliving. This new technology is rapidly evolving and researchers are even predicting the new development will be mainstream within a decade. But what about the deceased? Does it violate the ethics of bereavement? Does it tamper with people’s emotions and grieving processes? Hossein Rahnama of Ryerson University and the MIT Media Lab has been working on chatbots, a technology created from personal data. “Fifty or sixty years from now, millennials will have reached a point in their lives where they each will have collected zettabytes (1 trillion gigabytes) of data, which is just what is needed to create a digital version of yourself,” Rahnama says. This data can be a collection of emails, texts, tweets, and snapchats. Rahnama is working on artificial neural networks, which act like model brains that understand language patterns and process new information. We are commonly advised that time heals all wounds after experiencing a loss, but could Western society benefit from the idea that dead doesn’t equal gone? Chatbots are not looking to replace human interaction but they can provide an outlet to normalize conversations about death. Ouija, séances, chatbots all may sound uncanny, but for some they could provide a connection to a loved one and help bridge the gap between life and death.