Be Right Back
FYI, spoilers ahead for the “Black Mirror” episode, Be Right Back, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Martha and her social media absorbed husband, Ash, move into their new home in the countryside. Shortly after, he leaves to go return the moving van only to never return home and dies in a car accident. A friend informs her at the funeral that she had signed her up for a special service that would allow her to speak to her now deceased husband. She refuses to participate until she finds out that she is pregnant with his baby. Feeling lost and alone, she starts to chat with him online and eventually keeps upgrading his profile, giving him not just text, but a voice and then, eventually, a body. But day after day of being with him, she realizes that this replica is no replacement for Ash and she promptly hides him in the attic after she couldn’t make him commit suicide.
It’s scary to see that this is where things are going. The few things to concentrate on in this episode is the use of social media to build Ash’s personality profile along with the use of what we can guess is some form of very sophisticated animatronics.
We share so much, on so many different platforms that they could build a semi accurate model of our personalities off of what we share. How we rant on Twitter, what we did on Facebook, what we looked like on Instagram. Just things that that start to help give people, or in this case, a software, an idea of who we are. But there’s a major flaw in this argument, we are not always what we show online. I could tweet out the happiest things in the world, but be miserable on the inside. But if I want to portray that I am happy and always in a good mood, all I have to do is craft the words for it or maybe smile in a picture or two.
The problem that can be imagined and what Martha encounters is the fact that the replacement Ash is not a good replica of who Ash really was. He has no depth to his personality and eventually it becomes more and more apparent that he is nothing but replication software. He constantly asks questions that Ash would never ask, he would follow orders instead of fighting back. Simple things like that that people would never do kept happening, throwing Martha back into reality that it would never truly replace her husband.
Next is animatronics, it is easy to see that the real Ash and the replacement Ash, although they look similar, act differently. The way the replacement walks and composes himself is very mechanical and stiff, whereas the real Ash isn’t. Things like that can already throw a person off.
Next is the sex aspect. They show the real Ash trying to have sex but failing at it due to being tired, but the replacement Ash can just turn on and off erections like the machine that he is. There is no build up, no lust, just the replication of things he analyzed off of pornographic content. But you see her having the time of her life because it understands how to hit the right spots. It can go on forever whereas the real Ash is human and gets fatigued.
Just simple things like that starts to correlate with what is happening in this world. More and more we are starting to fall into that reality. We have created websites that learn off of what we tell it and it runs complicated algorithms that respond accordingly based on what we wrote (remember that mess of Microsoft’s Tay?).
Although I don’t think we’re anywhere near the sophistication that is show in the episode, I wouldn’t be surprised if we headed down that route? All the puzzle pieces are there, we just gotta figure out how it all fits together and develop those pieces a bit more. In Japan, they are creating more and more human like computers. In the US, they’re figuring out AIs. Those two are the essences of this episode. Plus, we share all our information online which is just a data goldmine that’s barely been tapped into.
What can we do to prevent this? I don’t really know. For those who want to do it personally? Maybe just limit the things you share. But I feel like there’s no way to stop what’s happening, the only thing we can do now is hope that the technology is in the right hands and no one is going to be crazy enough to create a computer that can best us (although that is just a big fat dream, humans aren’t that smart) and hope that the companies with our info won’t sell out more then just our preferences for ads (that is already concerning).
I wish I had a surefire way of dealing with this, but I really can’t do much more than hope, and hope I shall. Let’s just say that if these robots that throw off our grieving cycle, for instance, will come to exist. I hope I’m not around to see that disaster.
