Welcome, Goddess, to the special Halloween month series of the Goddess of Technology podcast.

Imagine losing someone you love. You know that this person is gone. You attend the funeral. You understand what death means.

Then your phone lights up. Their name appears on your screen. And they type: ‘I missed you.’

This is no paranormal encounter. No ghost has entered your phone. What you are seeing could be a deadbot or griefbot: an artificial intelligence system designed to simulate a deceased person using pieces of the digital life that person leaves behind.

In this podcast episode, we’re exploring the rapidly developing world of deadbots, griefbots, postmortem avatars and the digital afterlife.

We’re examining what these technologies are, where they come from, why someone might find them comforting and why researchers are simultaneously asking difficult questions about grief, identity, consent, privacy and emotional dependency.

Because there is something extraordinarily human behind this technological development: the desire for one more conversation.

One more question. One more laugh. One more chance to say ‘I love you.’

Yet what happens when technology transforms that wish into a product?

When an algorithm produces sentences your loved one never actually said, whose words are you reading?

Could an artificial recreation support healthy remembrance, or could an endlessly available simulation interfere with the psychological process of acknowledging loss?

Who gives consent for someone to be digitally resurrected?

What happens to the photographs, voice recordings, private messages and memories used to create that artificial person?

And perhaps the creepiest question of all: if you eventually decide to turn the deadbot off, can losing the simulation begin to resemble losing the person for a second time?

Beautiful, this Halloween episode takes you into a world where death, memory and artificial intelligence increasingly occupy the same digital room.

You may enter thinking this is a story about technology.

You may leave wondering what it means to be remembered.

I would love to hear your perspective. Would you ever create or interact with a deadbot of someone you love? Would you want an artificial version of yourself to remain after your death? E-mail your opinion or personal experience to coucou.goddess@gmail.com.

REFERENCES

• Block, H. and Riesewieck, M. (dirs.) (2024) Eternal You. Documentary film.

• CORDIS (2024) ‘Move over chatbot, here comes the deadbot’, European Commission, May 16th, 2024.

• Fernandez, N. (2025) ‘Griefbots: Blurring the Reality of Death and the Illusion of Life’, UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog, February 7th, 2025.

• Fu, Y. and Mei, Y. (2026) ‘A cautiously optimistic view of griefbot technology’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 25, pp. 611–633.

• Hollanek, T. and Nowaczyk-Basińska, K. (2024) ‘Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: On Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry’, Philosophy & Technology, 37, article 63.

• Marceau, E. (2026) ‘AI “deadbots” can fuel pathological grief and affect how we deal with death’, The Conversation, April 29th, 2026.

• Vlahos, J. (2017) ‘A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality’, Wired, July 18th, 2017.

Welcome to Halloween month at Goddess of Technology!

Your smartphone knows where you go, whom you contact, what you search for, which photographs you take, and how you communicate. That makes it extraordinarily useful. It can make it extraordinarily revealing, too.

In this podcast episode, we’re exploring stalkerware and digital surveillance: software and technologies that can transform an everyday device into an instrument for monitoring another person’s private life.

We’re examining what stalkerware is, how consumer surveillance technology evolved, why stalkerware presents a distinctive cybersecurity challenge, how digital surveillance affects human behaviour and psychological safety, and why an attacker does not necessarily require advanced hacking skills when proximity, trust, physical access, or existing knowledge provides another route into a person’s digital life.

Most importantly, we’re learning how greater digital awareness can help you strengthen your privacy, protect your autonomy, and make more intentional decisions about the technologies that accompany you through your life.

Goddess, I would love to hear your perspective. Have you ever discovered that an application, account, device, or location-sharing feature had access to more information about you than you expected?

E-mail your opinion or, if you feel comfortable doing so, your personal experience to coucou.goddess@gmail.com.

REFERENCES

• Chatterjee, R., Doerfler, P., Orgad, H., Havron, S., Palmer, J., Freed, D., Levy, K., Dell, N., McCoy, D. and Ristenpart, T. (2018) ‘The Spyware Used in Intimate Partner Violence’, 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 441–458.

• Citizen Lab (2019) The Predator in Your Pocket: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry. University of Toronto.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (2020) ‘Watch EFF Cybersecurity Director Eva Galperin’s TED Talk About Stalkerware’.

• Federal Trade Commission (2019) ‘FTC Takes Action Against Stalking Apps’.

• Federal Trade Commission (2021) Stalkerware: What To Know.

• Levy, K. and Schneier, B. (2020) ‘Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships’, Journal of Cybersecurity, 6(1).

• National Network to End Domestic Violence (2019) ‘The National Network to End Domestic Violence Joins Launch of Coalition Against Stalkerware’.

• Schneier, B. (2014) ‘Surveillance Is the Business Model of the Internet’.

• WIRED (2019) ‘Hacker Eva Galperin Has a Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware’.

Transparency and politeness both sound like universally positive qualities in business. Yet what happens when one professional culture interprets honesty as respect – while another interprets politeness as respect?

In this podcast episode, we’re exploring the conflict between more direct Central European business communication and the more diplomatically coded communication frequently encountered in English-speaking professional environments.

We’re examining why a German professional may interpret polite language as insincere, why a North-American professional may Dutch directness as rude and harsh, and why the words ‘perhaps’, ‘quite’, ‘a little’ or ‘I would suggest’ may carry considerably more force than their literal wording appears to contain.

We’re exploring the research behind low-context communication, direct and indirect negative feedback, politeness, face-saving, understatement, upgraders, downgraders and intercultural conflict.

More importantly, we’re discussing what happens when these differences enter business, leadership, negotiations, meetings, employees’ performance management and everyday workplace communication.

Because the real challenge in intercultural business communication is not just literally understanding what another person says. It is understanding what the other person believes they have communicated.

Goddess, I would love to hear your perspective. Have you experienced a situation where directness was interpreted as rudeness, or where politeness prevented an important message from being understood? E-mail your opinion and, if applicable, your personal experience to coucou.goddess@gmail.com.

REFERENCES

• Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Goffman, E. (1955) ‘On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction’, Psychiatry, 18(3), pp. 213–231.

• Hall, E.T. (1976) Beyond Culture. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

• House, J. (1989) ‘Politeness in English and German: The functions of please and bitte’, in Blum-Kulka, S., House, J. and Kasper, G. (eds.) Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, pp. 96–119.

• Kádár, D.Z. and Haugh, M. (2013) Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Meyer, E. (2014) The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. New York: PublicAffairs.

• Meyer, E. (2015) ‘Giving negative feedback across cultures’, INSEAD Knowledge, September 16th, 2015.

• Meyer, E. (2015) ‘The most productive ways to disagree across cultures’, INSEAD Knowledge, April 6th, 2015.

• Murphy, M.L. (2025) ‘Separated by a common im/politeness marker: please in American and British web-based English’, English Language & Linguistics.