What AI Ash did to Martha

Overview

After watching the Be Right Back episode from Black Mirror, I had a lot of mixed feelings. So before I get into what I thought about the episode, I would like to recap a little bit. So the show starts off with a couple obviously in love and they have just moved into a new place together. The husband, Ash, then goes to return the rental truck and never returns. It is assumed that he probably died in a car accident, as the rental truck was never returned and the police later show up to talk to the wife, although it is never outright said that Ash has died or how. There is then a funeral where a family member, named Sara, tries to console and relate to Martha, Ash's wife. Sarah then suggests and signs Martha up for an AI technology that is meant to help someone who has lost a loved one cope with their grief; by utilizing the deceased's online activity to mimic responses that the deceased would have made.

My Thoughts

Some of the things that I noticed in this episode were the fact that at the very beginning, when Martha and Ash are driving to their new place, she makes Ash lock his phone in the glove box. This to me signals that he is a heavy user and is easily distracted by his phone. This thought is later confirmed when she has him retrieve it from the rental truck and he brings it inside to update his status with an old photo of himself as a child. Martha, while making dinner, is trying to talk to him and he gives half responses that indicate that he is not really listening. These two incidents lead me to suspect that Ash probably died in a car accident while being on his phone. I think this is one part of the underlying theme that too much technology is harmful.

We then move on to Sara having signed Martha up for the AI technology that mimics the way Ash would have responded to Martha's input. We learn that the more the AI technology has access to, the more Ash-like the responses will be. So, Martha in her time of need and grieving, let's the AI have access to all of Ash's public posts and accounts online and even let's the AI have access to private online activity, video, and voice recordings of Ash. This allows the AI to copy Ash's voice so that an audio connection can be established. Martha then develops this strange act where she treats the AI as if it is Ash but also not at the same time. She will tell a story about Ash and then refer to the AI as "you" like she is talking directly to her husband. In my opinion, Martha becomes overly dependent on this technology. She freaks out when she drops her phone and the call is disconnected. She acts as if Ash had died all over again.

The next stage in the AI technology is actually very strange and interesting for me. The AI Ash tells Martha that he can manifest himself in flesh, like an Android. I think for everyone thinking about this kind of technology today, would feel extremely unsettled by it. Martha at first enjoys all the benefits of having a life-like android that looks like Ash, I even believe at first Martha believes that the AI Ash is the actual Ash. That is until she spends enough time with it to experience uncanny valley. She notices that the AI does not have the same mole as Ash on his collar bone, that the AI doesn't respond to certain situations the way it should have because there is no data for that specific instance and how to replicate it. In the end, Martha cannot even get rid of AI Ash and instead stores him in the attic just as Ash's mum did with photos whenever someone would pass away.

My overall thoughts on the meaning of this episode are that one, overuse or over-dependency on technology is detrimental for human mental health, two, that AI technology in this episode is actually very possible in the near future and it is both interesting and slightly unsettling. I think a lot of things need to be taken into consideration as we become more technologically advanced. We would need to assess the ability of AI's and then modify laws to help regulate them. If an AI becomes rogue, who would be responsible, if an AI becomes self-aware, do we have to redefine what makes us human? Will the AI be considered human? There's a whole mess that would have to be sorted and probably will have to be sorted out within the next hundred years.