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Monday, April 2, 2018

Should it be the future "coping mechanism" for grieving?

     Upon watching "Be Right Back," it was honestly interesting as much as it was a weird concept. I say interesting because how the short film promoted a new genre of science with I would assume to be "Biorobotics," which is actually loosely connected to cybernetics. Anyway, during the film, the wife, now a widow, had grew attach to an online AI version of her former husband. Growing slowly obsess with texting the online version of her deceased partner, she went to another level of obsession and gave enough voice data about him to actually speak on the phone with the AI. She eventually went to a weird place (at least to us) when she paid for a robot that was a spitting imagine of her husband.
     Now I would like to ask this question. Is this process a form of a "good grieving?" I understand that losing a love one can be a very painful process that eventually every human being would have to go through. Some lost may be worse than others. Some may be able to come to a healthy term with the death of a love one. However, I do not believe what "road of grievance" the wife took was the right one to take.
       I say this because when having a AI capable of becoming a replica of your deceased love one, then you cease to attempt to push towards the resolution of overcoming the lost of that love one. You would stop trying to come to terms with their death. Instead, you do the opposite of what we as humans usually do, under regular and sound minded  conditions, when dealing with death. We usually down scale the immense pain of losing someone important into a softer tone of understanding of the absence of that person as well as creating coating of good memories. We then hold on to those memories in order to cherish that persons life. However, what was shown in this film was the exact opposite. Instead it escalated this traumatic event.
     As seen in the film, when she dropped her phone after the ultrasound with the AI on the phone, she almost had a nervous breakdown. It was as if she was losing him for the second time. That scene, along with most of the film, is a perfect representation of how this would not be a very healthy way of coping with death by no means. You are holding on to remnants of that person, which we already do now with pictures. But the huge difference is if we have smart enough AI's like the film predicted, then we believe that those remnants are actually the real person; which we all know that that is not the truth.

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