The Black Mirror episode Be right back is an interesting story. Martha's husband Ash passes away in a car accident. Martha discovers a software program where she could talk to Ash. This somehow gives Martha comfort in being able to “contact” Ash just like he was really there. Martha grows with the software program and becomes attached at some point. The program gathers all of Ashes social media information including videos, pictures, and even personal emails so that the program is able to learn who ash was. There are three levels to this, one being just texting over the phone, the next being that she could send videos of Ash to the program and it can learn his voice, so she could talk to him on the phone. And the third was a human like robot. It looked just like Ash, and has almost all of his personality traits. But sadly it did not have the memories and/or emotional level of Ash.The whole idea I gathered was “was it really ash?”
The problem is that it is not really Ash. The only information that program can gather is from social media. Though Ash 2 can learn quickly he does not have all of the human like emotions/characteristics.
When she tells him to jump off the cliff, Ash 2 did not have the emotional connection real humans have, so he was just going to jump. He did not have fear so he was just going to do what she told him to do. She tells him he is not enough of Ash. Ash 2 did not have to eat, sleep, or even breath. Ash 2 quickly learns to have these emotional feelings because robots do not have this.They are not real humans with a conscious. The fact that he lacks these certain feelings/emotions upsets Martha because even though he looks and feels like Ash 1 he is still a software that is not her real husband.
Throughout the film we realize Ash 2 is not enough, he has flaws because there is no way the software could know everything about Ash and I believe this is one of the many problems with these “future” technologies. The technologies that are evolving can never be exactly perfect and the fact that we will one day be able to do exactly this is kind of frightening. I do not think this was a healthy situation for Martha for she was not able to grieve properly. If you think about this, this type of software is incredible and inhumane at the same time.
3 comments:
I too agree that Martha's attachment to robot Ash was unhealthy because she never took the time to grieve over the real Ash therefore, it could be assumed that when Martha actually starts grieving the real Ash she starts finding flaws in robot Ash. This would explain why she starts disliking robot Ash and why she feels that he is not enough of the real Ash because he lacks the emotional connection/responses that the real Ash would have engaged in.
I agree that Martha wasn’t properly grieving. Rather then dealing with her loss in a healthy way she resorted to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Instead she tried to cope with losing Ash by replacing him with basically a robot of him. For a while it seemed like she was content with a robot version that mimicked the real Ash. That is until she realized that it wasn’t really Ash, at least not the real Ash.
I would agree with Karen as well that Yes her relationship with Ash 2 is not a way to replace the piece that was lost when Ash died. Though you did say at the end that the software is inhumane, I do not believe that this is always the case. In Martha's situation, she wanted to replace her love by essentially buying a representation of him. She thought the artificial being will fill the missing piece, but it was not Ash, not all the aspects and qualities that was Ash. If I were to have an artificial buddy, I would never need a human friend again (haha). So in her case, it was inhumane, but she just was not ready for it, but that is not for everyone. Great Blog!
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