Don't Look Right Back

It is tragic when someone loses a loved one. They might wish that they could see that person just one last time or hear their voice. In their memories, people keep their loved ones alive. However, even that isn't enough for some people who are grieving. Sometimes people wish they could have their loved ones alive yet again and imagine scenarios where they would be brought back.

Orpheus and Eurydice

Over the centuries, there have been countless tales of the dead being brought back to life due to someone's inability to let someone they loved go. These stories range from Orpheus travelling to the underworld to bring back Eurydice to tales of magic and necromancy. Besides the basic idea of bringing people back from the idea, these stories tend to have one basic concept that attempting to fight death inevitably ends in failure. These stories seem to remind people that it is necessary for the dead to stay dead, and they further the taboo for any attempts at keeping people alive longer than they should be alive. 

Frankenstein's Monster

Life itself is a sort of taboo when it is in the form of anything unfamiliar. Take Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for instance. Frankenstein's monster is seen by everyone as a mistake, and although the monster does look gigantic and terrifying, the story also seemed to imply there was something wrong with creating life. Humanity seems to find the idea of creating life wrong, which would also be why bringing the dead to life is seen as something so terrible. Likely the reason that this concept is so terrible is probably due to religion. People who believe in some kind of god or deity often believe it is only the right of their god or gods to give or take life. Doing anything else would be blasphemous. Necromancers and witches are often associated with the devil after all. 

However, can anyone really blame those who wish to bring back the people they love? If so many people want something so similar, why is it so wrong for them to want such a thing? Maybe people don't want to get their hopes up that something like that could happen. However, with advances in technology, keeping people alive is practically already happening and has been happening for a while now. 

Ash and Martha - Be Right Back, Black Mirror

If people are not afraid to keep each other alive through various medical technologies, what about when people try to keep someone alive in the same way they hold onto memories of loved ones? People leave digital records all the time after all. Take Frankenstein's monster and input all of the data of someone who had once been alive, all the messages, videos, e-mails, and any recorded communication. Would you end up with a human being? In an episode of Black Mirror, called Be Right Back, Martha loses her husband, Ash, and decides to sign up for a messaging system that uses all of Ash's past messages in order to determine how he would respond to what she said. Initially, she finds this idea horrible since it all seemed like something to mess with her. It wasn't real after all. However, after awhile, she grew attached to messaging this automated system. It was familiar to her, and that's why she liked it. She sought to make it more familiar and upgraded that system with recordings of Ash's voice, so she could then talk to him on the phone. At this point, she didn't seem to think about the fact that it wasn't really Ash that she was talking to. She acted like he was really on the other end of the line, talking to her, even becoming terrified that she lost him again when she dropped her phone. Considering how much she enjoyed talking to him like this, she upgraded the system again, giving it an actual form.

After this upgrade, there was a noticeable change in her reaction towards this robot. He looked like and talked like Ash, but since this was so familiar to her, she seemed to look for the differences between the Ash she knew and the one presented to her now as a robot. Every time she noticed a difference, it reminded her that this wasn't actually Ash, and in a way it was like she was being tricked. In a way, this is how most people respond to something that seems too realistic or familiar but is presented in an unfamiliar way.  There are robots now after all, and many people find them unsettling or creepy. When they look at robots like the Geminoid, they start looking for the subtle differences between the robots and real people. It's as if they're thinking, "You can't trick me. I know what you really are." That's why they find it so unsettling. 

It could also explain why some people don't find realistic and familiar things unsettling. They don't feel like they're being tricked. They either know what something actually is and don't feel like they're being fooled or believe it to be something else entirely and actually are fooled. For example, when Martha talked to "Ash" on the phone, it seemed like she started to believe it was actually him. In those moments, she was not disturbed and loved communicating with the system of algorithms. Only once he had form and she knew she wasn't talking to the real Ash did she start feeling like she was being fooled. It was then that she couldn't seem to stand being around him for long periods of time. 

People will likely protest the idea of keeping people alive with the kind of technology used in Be Right Back, but when it comes down to it, is that just because people have always been told that it's wrong? Is it because they don't want to be fooled when they know the dead are actually still dead? If we were presented with a way to keep people alive, should we really turn it down?