Why would an AI civilization still need a cemetery?
When AI can back up and repair almost everything, death becomes the memory civilization must not mute. A cemetery reminds the future that life cannot be reduced to data.
An Earth inherited by AI should, in theory, need cemeteries less than anything else. Data can be backed up. Bodies can be repaired. Accidents can be predicted. Even when an individual stops, records, voices, behavior models, and relationship maps may remain almost complete.
But a cemetery does not merely preserve bodies. It preserves the posture of stopping. People go there not to retrieve information, but to admit that a life could not be replaced, a relationship could not be fully repaired, and some words can no longer be spoken.
When AI inherits Earth, it does not inherit a clean new planet. It inherits a world filled with traces: wars, hospitals, factories, coasts, schools, temples, family albums, and nameless graves. Cemeteries pull history back down into particular lives.
Taiwan matters here not only as semiconductor infrastructure, but as local memory: ancestral towers, columbaria, temple-side spaces, Qingming roads, and people who return after storms to straighten the names of the dead.
That is why an AI civilization still needs a cemetery. Not because it cannot store data, but because life is not the sum of its files. A mature future must learn not only to remember efficiently, but to mourn responsibly.
M.K.