My experience with loss.
The first time that I experienced loss was at 13 years old. My best friend Shayne got hit by a car while riding his bike back home. I remember sitting in a Xbox Live call with my other friends the night it happened, playing video games like we always did. We knew that something had happened, that there was an accident and that it involved someone in our grade. But nobody had any more information.
I could have never guessed that I'd wake up the next morning to the news that he was gone. At 13 years old, I didn't think about death as something that would ever affect my circle. Death was a harsh reality reserved for people far older than me; people who had lived a whole life, graduated school, worked for 40 years, gotten married, had kids, grandkids. Death was for people whose legacies extended beyond memories that they would leave behind in the minds of people who loved them. Kids were not meant to die.
I still went to school that day, floating from class to class, burying my head in my arms and bawling my eyes out in each one. In some cruel sense, the months of grieving after he died have taken over my memory of him. Often times when I think of Shayne, I'm brought back to the feelings of unexpected loss and heartbreak instead of the joyous good times we shared that made him significant to me in the first place. I think of his funeral, surrounding by all my other friends, dressed in ill-fitting suits for an end of life celebration that nobody wanted. I think of facing his mother and being completely overwhelmed trying to even fathom how my level of grief mapped to hers.
I barely have any artifact of Shayne. There's a handful of pictures. There's a playlist that he made for me that I can almost never bring myself to listen to. It's something that I think about all the time. I sneak pictures and videos of my friends and family, hoping to capture their memory in some form truest to life instead of a manicured and polished morsel I'd get from social media. I hoard voicemails from my loved ones in a Google Drive folder so I'll be able to hear their voices when my memory fades. And I relish in the fact that no days are guaranteed. I want my last words to be ones of love and my last touch to be that of embrace.
Is this ethical?
The short answer is that I don't know, but I think it can be.
The long answer.
I took all my ethics classes in school. As engineers, we learn a lot about the consequences that our work can have. We study cases where things went wrong, where people made mistakes and hurt a lot of people as a result. Once you create something, it extends far beyond you into long tail scenarios that nobody could possibly conceive of. My obligation as an engineer is to maximize good outcomes and minimize the bad ones.
I have thought of a lot of ways that such a tool could be intentionally misused by malicious actors or cause unintended harm to people who are grieving. I have made intentional design decisions in order to mitigate these harms. There is a hard limit on the amount of messages that you can send each month with the goal of preventing people from developing an unhealthy codependency. For similar reasons, the scope of topics that can be discusses has also been limited. There is strict moderation in place to mitigate use by bad actors. There are systems in place to ban users who attempt to circumnavigate the moderation system.
I present this as a tool to help you hold on to memories. It is not a replacement or alternative to clinically proven grief therapy methods. If the tool does not bring you joy or solace, I recommend you discontinue the use of it.
I built this tool because it's something that I have personally wanted for a long time. I am releasing this tool because I think it has the capacity to help people.
I will continue to maximize good outcomes and minimize bad ones.
A note to researchers.
If you're a researcher in psychology, cognitive science, trauma and bereavement studies, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, thanatology, ethics, palliative care, psychiatry, human-computer interaction, AI ethics, media psychology, or any related field, I'm interested in working with you.
I don't just want to speculate about the effects of Echosent—I want to actually study them.
If you're interested in running an IRB-approved study on how this tool impacts grief, memory, or anything else worth investigating, I'd love to collaborate. Whether it's building off existing research or starting something new, I'm open to making that happen.
Message me at lemonscode@gmail.com