It is debatable within the grief community whether there are 5 or 6 stages to grief. The stages include: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance with the sixth debatable stage being hope. Nowhere in this list is "replicating and attempting to replace the object you are grieving with an artificial version of it". That may be because this stage would be unhealthy, and it would prevent the person from actually completing these stages, and in the future moving on from the grief causing incident. The stages of grief are commonly accepted because they display times for the griever to feel their emotions, analyze them with personal time, and then make steps towards mending their lives. It isn't to say that this is strictly the only way people can grieve and any deviation from this structure is unhealthy and wrong, but it does lay out a pretty decent timeline of what most people experience.
If we were ever able to create the technology that was present in the Black Mirror episode "Be right back" I would hope that we would not use it for purposes like they did . In the short film, Martha began to go through grief, but then she is signed up for the AI program that created Ash 2. It may have caught her at the bargaining stage, where she was willing to do anything to get Ash 1 back, including downloading all his internet history into a robot. This was a block in her being able to actually feel the loss of Ash 1 in the depression stage, and then be able to accept that he was gone with the acceptance stage. She instead tried to replace Ash 1 with Ash 2 as if they were the same " person". We saw Martha soon become frustrated at the lack of Ash 1's nuances that were transferred to Ash 2. She began to isolate herself, which made the situation even worse. She eventually just put Ash 2 in the attic because she was only reminded more of Ash 1 by the lack of authenticity in Ash 2. We can assume after this she resumed the typical grief stages, but everyone else may not be string enough emotionally to do what she did. This is why I think that the technology such as the one that created Ash 2 would not be very beneficial to humans. It would have the opposite of it's intended affect and could cause people more harm that good.
3 comments:
The technology that was used is a horrible way to get over grieving like you mentioned and I think it is only makes the person feel worse about the love one being gone. when Martha put him in the attic instead of getting completely rid him, she still was upset about the fact Ash was gone.
I agree that Ash 2 prevented Martha from properly dealing with the death of Ash. I think that this technology would do more harm than good., because it doesn't allow the people to properly handle grief.
I agree that making a Ash 2 did not help Martha in her grieving process but you can't help but feel sympathy for Martha. She never really got closure from the death of her husband. I admit she did take it too far when she bought and created Ash 2 but I felt really bad for her.
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