Reincarnation is Not Enough.

Recently, I watched an episode from The Black Mirror series called Be Right Back, which is about a couple getting ready to move into a new house which apparently is connected to the boyfriend’s personal life; he used to live in it when he was a child. The girlfriend’s name is Martha and the boyfriend’s name is Ash. Ash was pretty much a tech savvy person considering that he was glued to his phone majority of the episode until his death. (I am still wondering how he died.) As Martha mourns over this tragedy, her “friend,” Sarah, gave her some advice on how to cope with the loss by suggesting that she tries an app that allows her to “connect with the deceased.” At first, Martha was not fond to that idea at all until she found out that she was pregnant. She then decides to try out the app just to let Ash know that he will become a father soon, and this is where things take a total turn.

Later throughout the episode, she interacts with the app as if it is a sentient being. It gets to the point that she is pretty much regaining herself through this method. Techno Ash made her feel as if Ash was still around despite the fact that he died. Martha was then persuaded by Techno Ash to order a cybernetic body for him to be programmed into so that she could revive Ash and live happily again. After this, Martha starts to realize that this Ash 2.0 is not the same Ash that was once living and she starts to regret take things this far. She was aggravated by the fact that he was programmed through Ash’s social media history that Ash 2.0 lacked the emotional response to other scenarios such as the argument they had in the bedroom. Eventually, Martha becomes frightened of Ash 2.0 because he was so human-like yet is a robot that the combination was paradoxical.

The correlation to this episode and the Uncanny Valley is that Ash 2.0 was merely a robot posing as a human substitute for the real Ash and usually this concept makes actual humans more unease. The moral of the story is that we cannot recreate someone and expect to have the same feelings towards it when it used to be an actual living person. One reason is because that we are aware that the recreation is not the original, and another reason is that we are emotional creatures. We cannot interact well with someone or something that lacks emotions or even worse, mimicking emotions because they lack the ability to self-generate those emotions. The crazy part is that we tend to rely on technology so much that it could be used to comfort ourselves emotionally better than just socially interacting with another human being. Why is that the case? The answer is still floating around waiting to be discovered. Maybe clicking on the link below will help.

Q Sensor: The data of our emotions