Brought Back to "Life"

In Black Mirror's "Be Right Back", the idea of using technology to bring back someone who has died is explored. In this episode Martha's husband, Ash, dies from what appears to have been a car accident. Unable to cope with the loss of her husband, Martha turns to a program that allows her to communicate with him. A factor that brings later complications is that this "Ash" is formed solely from information gathered from sources accessible to technology including social media, texts, phone calls, and emails.

When Martha firsts meets "Ash", she is fully aware that it is a robot and not her husband, but then quickly begins attempting to make it more human and like her Ash. This is nearly impossible as "Ash" is incapable of experiencing true human emotion as it is of course a robot. While "Ash" does at one-point display sadness and fear in crying, these emotions are only imitations that appear fairly realistic. This display of emotions is still inhuman as they do not come from sadness or fear, but from Martha explaining that that is how Ash would've behaved in such circumstances. At this point in the episode, Martha is telling "Ash" to jump to its "death" off of a ledge. "Ash" is also unable to truly experience these emotions here as it does not understand mortality as humans do especially when facing death.

A major setback in making "Ash" more like Ash is that it does not have any of his memories, thoughts, or opinions that play a key role in defining who Ash was. Martha does her best in describing to it how Ash would have behaved, but it is still not enough to make it like him as it is learning and adapting to these things, not letting it define "himself". At the same time, "Ash" is unable to create new memories and form opinions as Ash would with the limited information it has.

This episode brings to light the possibility of immortalizing a consciousness by downloading it to a computer. If technology ever progresses to the point where a human consciousness can be downloaded to a computer, it may be used as a means to prolong life. This, however, may not be the best solution as the robot will probably resemble something like "Ash" as it may be unable to really act upon those memories and opinions like a human would.