The Moral Issues Presented in "Be Right Back"

In Black Mirror’s short film “Be Right Back” a story takes place where the wife of a deceased man is enrolled in a service which looks at her husband’s social media accounts to recreate a version of him she can talk on the phone with, using his voice and personality. As the story progresses, the woman gets allot more attached to the phone and decides to upgrade it to a human version of him.

At first, the woman is happy to have a recreation of her husband back but is then frustrated by the small differences the robot and her husband have, even if they are ideal differences. These differences included the robot giving her his unconditional attention, and doing everything she asked him to do.

While the robot version of her husband is indeed a better version of him by conventional standards, she does not feel pleased because it is not the person she married. This is because the robot has imperfections that don’t allow him to be exactly like her husband. This is what I would call a programmable error. Something that could easily be fixed by the programmers by just including it in the robot’s software. An example of this would be when the robot is sleeping, it doesn’t close its eyes or breath because it doesn’t need to sleep or breathe.  The robot’s manufacturers would most likely be aware of issues like these making their customers uncomfortable and would default all robots to breathe and close their eyes when they are expected to sleep.

This is where the film misses the mark in its commentary. While the show had the opportunity to explore if the robot was indistinguishable from a human, is it morally ethical to have a robot replace your deceased husband? Instead, the film depicts a robot with flaws. This leaves the question unanswered, which provides little to no commentary on the subject.

The video mainly included these errors because people can’t explain why they think marrying a robot is wrong there is just an uneasy feeling that comes with it. It is just described as weird. While many people don’t believe this is a problem it is already a serious issue. A man on TLC’s My Strange Addiction is in a committed relationship with his car. Both scenarios are equally disturbing because the partner they have is neither conscious or nor human. They are machines no matter how similar they look to humans. If people are to stop this from happening there needs to be a reasonable explanation to give to people when you tell a person they should not be dating machines.

The film didn’t get everything wrong. One of the more important questions to answer came when the woman asked the robot to disobey her. This confuses the robot who can’t make decisions of their own. If the robot did disobey her he would be following her orders, but if it didn’t it would be following orders like a robot. This problem has no simple answer since people shouldn’t program robots to disobey something a human says if it is reasonable.

My favorite part of the film came when it is revealed that Martha kept Ash2 in the attic because she was unsure of what to do with it. I think it symbolizes where humanity is at now, not knowing whether to fully embrace future technology or be afraid of it.