In the first episode of the second season of the great British speculative science fiction series, Black Mirror, entitled “Be Right Back” (IMDb, Wikipedia), broadcast in February 2013, a woman devastated by the death of her partner in a road accident, hires a service that offers to “rebuild” the personality of the deceased based their social network footprint.
The episode continues with another set of avatars that I’m not going to discuss so as not to spoil it for those readers who have not yet seen it (if you like this page and still have not seen Black Mirror, I highly recommend you rectify that). The point is that there was a long article yesterday in The Verge, called “Speak, memory” which tells how Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of artificial intelligence startup Luka, which develops chatbot technology, took the decision to “rebuild” her friend Roman Mazurenko, who died in a traffic accident, using her enormous archive of instant messaging conversations with him.
The article mentions that Eugenia had seen the episode of Black Mirror and that this inspired her to pay a tribute to her friend that would go beyond a simple photograph album or website. It also notes that the reactions — positive and negative — of friends and relatives of Roman, and the extent to which the bot Eugenia created really reflect the personality and way of speaking of her friend, as well as how “talking”…
