Emotions or Technology?

The human race has always been obsessed with technology. From fire, to steam engines and computers humans have always explored innovating technology to facilitate life. Being warm, making manual labor easier and having accessible knowledge are few ways technology has helped people preform practical tasks. But, what happens when technology doesn’t fulfil our emotional needs?

When a person is hurt, he or she acts irrationally. In Black Mirror’s episode “Be right Back” we follow the story of a couple in the near future. The husband, Ash, dies from an awful car crash. The wife devastated, had her emotions all over the place. Ash’s sister, presented the wife with a website that took all of the information Ash has ever posted online to create a “voice” she [wife] could talk to. Creepy, right? Well, it escalates a bit further. After the wife and robotic voice Ash talked for a while the voice told the wife that, for a price, the voice could be made into a physical robotic duplicate of Ash. Creepier, right? As promised Ash 2, the robot Ash, came in the mail and was soon activated. At first the wife was glad her husband wasn’t gone gone, she had a duplicate. The problem with Ash 2 is that he wasn’t really Ash. He talked, moved, and looked like the original but wasn’t him. He could never be Ash because the robot only knew what he made known in his online profile not what happened every second of every day. This made the wife even crazier, because how can she be seeing and touching Ash but it wasn’t him?

Technology is great for practical things: obtaining information, reminding events and appointments, purchasing objects, entertainment, etc. When it comes to helping people cope with feelings such as pain, anger, frustration, sadness, desperation and loss technology isn’t that great. Sure, people such as Ash’s wife should be able to control themselves when hyper-emotional but technology is always there. People have gotten used that computers and cellular phones solve the majority of our problems. Therefore, a person in need will turn to the things that always come through for him or her. This turns the question to, how does technology help humans in their emotional needs? What measures do the inventors take to ensure that a person doesn’t go mad when using his or her technology?

Everyone can agree that the program used by Ash’s wife to cope with the loss of her husband is fantastic and that most of us would use some degree of it to communicate with deceased loved ones. But, shouldn’t there have been some sort of warning or disclaimer with the robots? Something in the likes of “realistic technology may cause severe attachment” or “people under severe emotions of loss and depression should be cautions of this product”. 

Humans are and always be obsessed with technology, with ways to innovate and to become better; but in the process of creating new things it has forgotten the emotional consequences of it. The video above will explain how technology will be moving forward to find solutions to emotional problems.