To make things easier for people who comment on my blog post, I will ask a question: given that Ash1 and Martha’s daughter was potentially raised in a society in which these robot clones are common and that Ash2 is literally programmed by pictures, text messages, videos, and other physical memories of Ash1 that she would have potentially had access to anyway, do you think there is anything objectionable about allowing her to visit Ash2?
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Making Love to a Robot Clone of Your Dead Lover, Then Locking Him in the Attic.
This episode of Black Mirror, Be Right Back, presented multiple ethical issues for discussion, presenting a society capable of creating AI impersonations and robotic doppelgangers of our deceased friends and family. I personally do not believe that, were I a member of this hypothetical future society and my wife had recently passes away, I would not be able to join the program due to both moral and emotional objections to its execution. While the first stage of the program, programming the computer to send text messages in the way your loved one would, would not be as difficult for me to deal with emotionally, it would be an emotional gut punch to hear my wife’s voice again when I know cognitively that she is gone. Moving on to the final stage, the creation of the robotic duplicate, is unthinkable to me. It simply seems disrespectful: that I am saying my wife is completely replaceable. Some might contend that it is not replacing her but rather bringing her back, as it is programmed to act in accordance with video/text/email/social media accounts of her behavior. However, I would argue that while this robot is indeed a flawless preservation and imitator of these behaviors, it is an incomplete memory based solely on a limited facet of her personality. This incompleteness is shown in the film at the start of Martha’s sex scene with Ash2, in which he was incapable of initiating any sort of response himself and defending this by explicitly saying it is due to a lack of recording of Ash’s sexual response. Furthermore, by virtue of being a robot it would be a completely different person from the individual it was meant to mimic. My hypothetical wife, for example, would have never had the experience of waking up in a bathtub covered in electrolytes, or lying in bed staring at the ceiling next to me while I slept (I hope), or of standing in the front lawn all night and consequentially feeling “ornamental.” That joke in particular demonstrates the separate line of thinking that these robot clones would experience. An ornament is an inanimate object used exclusively for decoration, and by saying that he felt ornamental after spending all night standing on the front lawn, Ash2 was acknowledging that he was in fact an object rather than a true human being. While Ash1 was certainly flippant and prone to cracking wise, that is a joke he would have never made simply because he was never anything other than human.
To make things easier for people who comment on my blog post, I will ask a question: given that Ash1 and Martha’s daughter was potentially raised in a society in which these robot clones are common and that Ash2 is literally programmed by pictures, text messages, videos, and other physical memories of Ash1 that she would have potentially had access to anyway, do you think there is anything objectionable about allowing her to visit Ash2?
To make things easier for people who comment on my blog post, I will ask a question: given that Ash1 and Martha’s daughter was potentially raised in a society in which these robot clones are common and that Ash2 is literally programmed by pictures, text messages, videos, and other physical memories of Ash1 that she would have potentially had access to anyway, do you think there is anything objectionable about allowing her to visit Ash2?
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10am,
Be Right Back,
Uncanny Valley
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I agree with your argument wholeheartedly. The first stage of the program might be manageable, but turning a deceased loved one into a digital form is a bit delusional to me. For one, it is selfish because it insinuates that you don't respect someone's eternal right to rest, and secondly, you are disturbing your own rest and mental state. Knowing that this person has died and keeping a robotic version of them around will only leave you frazzled and feeling a sense of guilt. Frazzled because you will always feel incomplete or frustrated knowing that the robot cannot perform exact acts of the real person (sleeping, eating, etc.). Guilty because you may be neglecting friends or family to spend time with it, or because you feel the need to hide it from others. Even in a world that accepts robotic versions of deceased people, I don't think Martha was right for allowing her daughter to have access to Ash2. Why? Because it's sending mixed messages. Obviously, she thinks it's wrong because she keeps it in the attic, but if she really accepted the thought, she would allow it to interact with them as a family more often. In real life, I think we would do the same. We might accept it because it's the norm, but in our heart and minds we'd probably always feel a little uneasy because it's the thought of knowing it's not a real human being.
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