No, please don't "Be Right Back"

In Netflix's Black Mirror episode, "Be Right Back," we discussed the issues of androids being unsettling or off-putting. Personally I found the idea of someone being brought back like Ash was, very unsatisfactory. Ash 2 never sounded like he was referring to himself in the early stages, he always sounded like he was referring to Ash 1 up until a certain point where it was like he had finally learned enough about Ash 1 to pretend to be him. In my opinion if you want to bring someone back, you really need to capture their likeness in every way, not just their social media presence, and ideally you want to avoid the android having a learning period. I think that was one of the worst things about Ash 2, and was one of the most unsettling. For instance, when he looked up information on a fact while Martha was talking about the suicide cliffs. Martha had to tell him that she did not like that. So avoiding a learning stage would be pretty important in establishing a seamless change in people and personalities. Continuing that point, personality was not something exactly described in the uncanny valley. It definitely is a big factor going forward into the future however. Take another sci-fi like Altered Carbon where people can be brought back an infinite number of times through their "stacks," which are a method of storing someones memory and personality to be able to transplant it into a new body. In the universe of Altered Carbon there is some resistance to this method of resurrection, but it is mostly for religious reasons and not because the resurrected people are uncanny. But in this Altered Carbon, the likeness of the person is not captured, only their mind, and people seem to be happy with this. Sure, it is a show and not necessarily reflective of reality, but in my opinion we would react similarly if this were a reality.

So to go back to my title -- Personally I believe that we should be able to bring people back to life, I am not incredibly concerned with the concept of playing God, however, I think we should avoid trying to "resurrect" people until we can better capture their likeness in a way similar to Ash, but where it does not rely on social media to build a personality. Alternatively, wait until we can transplant the consciousness of one person to any body or "sleeves" as they are referred to in Altered Carbon so that we can avoid instances of the Uncanny Valley. But ultimately we could end up really liking androids similar to Ash, since human behavior can be fairly unpredictable when it comes to future technologies.