extra credit – black mirror
Black MIrror’ Be Right Back episode talks about how people could be mourned in the future. The woman, Martha’s, boyfriend is killed in a car crash and to help her mourn, she finds AI that allows her to make a copy of her now deceased boyfriend. That being said, this takes a turn for the worse as Martha becomes too dependent on the AI and leads to the idea of an AI turning sentient.
The idea of AI and where that future can be is scary, and this episode backs that up. Rather than just trying to mourn the loss of a loved one, sentientism, as well as dealing with grief as a parent. Martha uses an AI android to replace the love of her life, however that takes a deep dark turn when, although the AI can please her in some ways, other ways lead Martha to slowly spiral out of control (similar to many other Black Mirror episodes). The AI, which is created by a model of old social media posts from Ash, starts good but turns bad as Martha notices that the AI is not another version of Ash that functions like a regular human, but rather like the robot that it is.
The idea of using a dead person’s social media to bring them back to life has been toyed around by companies like Amazon, where a feature of Alexa was being able to use prior info to make a deceased person come back to life, was extremely criticized. In addition, hologram models (similar to one that Kanye West gifted to Kim Kardashian for her birthday) are also considered to be a gray area in the world of technology. As one starts to be heavily reliant on the AI of a deceased loved one, it can lead them to having the illusion of them still being there, which in turn can lead to delusion. While the idea of the show was interesting, it paints an interesting yet grim reality of out future.
Recently, OpenAI launched their chat bot beta and, in a way, it could be trained to imitate certain aspects of what was in this Black Mirror episode. That being said, the next question to ask is is there a line? If so, where? This episode shows how the future can have ways to augment how a person lives their life, but also shows that by mimicking the loss of a loved one, it can lead to delusion and pain that will last longer than the initial pain of loss.