Be right back. That was the title of one of the most dystopian episodes of the second season of Black Mirror. The plot may seem simple at first glance, but as time passes, it becomes a fabric with multiple layers that goes beyond the original science fiction storyline.
In the 49 minutes that Be Right Back lasts, we are told the story of Martha and Ash, a young couple living in a technological environment similar to ours nowadays. The drama unfolds with Ash’s death in a car accident. It is precisely in the grieving process that Martha, through a friend, discovers an artificial intelligence that can replicate Ash’s behavior through text messages. Martha decides to give the application a chance and begins to interact with the virtual Ash. After some time, Martha takes it a step further and upgrades the service, opting for a life-sized replica of Ash, also managed by artificial intelligence, attempting to reproduce her ex-partner’s behavior. As in the previous part, the rest of the episode is filled with nuances and small details that lead to various reflections beyond mere technological facts. Among them is the fact that, produced in 2016, Be Right Back was conceived as a dystopia. Today, it is fully real.
A new God
Beyond the genuine science fiction element of this episode, the way that Martha deals with grief by using technology leads to one of the central issues of our time: the search for meaning. While the Cartesian rationality of our era led to Nietzsche‘s famous «God is dead,» where it was claimed that our quest for knowledge had displaced God from the privileged position it held; current technology, understood in its broadest sense, seems to have taken the place of the old gods, especially when it comes to offering the same meaning and certainties on essential matters.
French rabbi and philosopher Delphine Horvilleur speaks in «Vivre avec nos morts» about what she calls a «comic stratagem.» In other words, the emotional elaboration that humans have fabricated throughout their history to keep death at bay. According to the author, «it is inherent in humanity to believe that it can keep death at bay, create barriers and narratives, scheme to keep it away, or convince itself that a series of rituals or words confer such power.» It is in this pretended distance, in this imaginary barrier, that modern society has placed death, displacing it and trying to tiptoe around everything that surrounds it. This is what Baudrillard, speaking of it, called «desocialisation». Behind this feigned representation, something essential is hidden: the absence of ritual. Where there was once meaning, there is now emptiness.
This almost Mephistophelian attempt to extend existence beyond the possible articulates the great paradox that humanity has faced in an almost atavistic way: death is not only the opposite side of life, but the former is an extension of the latter. From an essential point of view, where there is one, the other must exist. Or as Octavio Paz wrote: «the worship of life, if truly profound and total, is also worship of death. Both are inseparable. A civilization that denies death ends up denying life.»
Artificial intelligence and transcendence
In this context, it is not surprising that one of the products that the AI industry has been working on for years is griefbots. These applications are nothing more than the first version of the AI product with which Martha interacts in Be Right Back. In them, the grieving person can have a two-way conversation with the digital representation of the deceased through a conversational interface. As if from a Jules Verne novel, dystopia has become reality through applications like Hereafter.ai or December project, software developments that have already given voice and text to the deceased based on data collected from different sources over a certain period of time. Also, YOV, which allows the creation of versonas, a digital version of a person in order to, as stated on its website, «maintain your bond forever.»
In this way, life after death is, or could be, digital. The transhumanism of our era is redirecting the transition to the virtual environment with the main goal of preserving it over time. And if, as often happens, language is the symptom of an era, this new time is already creating a new vocabulary that reformulates the old relationship between life and death with a layer of digital veneer: digital ghost, AI resurrections, digital afterlife, virtual cemeteries, in memoriam accounts, or virtual wills.
Griefbots, which have already been the subject of controversies and academic discussions, are also the central theme of the documentary «Eternal You,» recently premiered at Sundance with great repercussions. Focusing on different griefbots, directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck investigate through the testimony of psychologists, AI investors, developers, and users, the benefits and risks of such applications. In their words, «the documentary is not just about new technologies but about the current Western world’s inability to deal with grief and death.»
A new meaning
A study by the Ferrer i Guardia Foundation states that 40% of the Spanish population declares itself atheist. This figure has quadrupled since the 1980s. In the same vein, Americans’ connection with religion has steadily declined for decades. According to the Pew Research Center, today only 41% consider religion very important in their lives. This is the lowest figure in history. In this secularization environment, with a rise in so-called new spiritualities, technology is beginning to create the illusion of a new meaning, where Horvilleur’s «comic stratagem» becomes tangible through data ingestion, avatars, and versonas. All those who participate in this virtuality will be able to create the narrative that consoles them. But in the end, it would be about delving a little deeper into the banality of our time. Ultimately, everything would consist of believing, but without truly believing. A patch within the immense void.
Recent studies in the field of psychology suggest that griefbots, beyond their immediate benefits, could have negative effects on the grieving process. Maggi Savin-Baden, a researcher in the digital world, distinguishes between unidirectional communication (as found in online memorials) and bidirectional communication (originating through griefbots). It is through this bidirectional communication that individuals could experience a chronic phase of denial of death or loss, getting trapped in an infinite conversation with a being that does not truly exist.
John Berger, in his «Twelve theses on the economy of the dead,» claimed that «the living and the dead were interdependent. Always. Only an extraordinarily modern form of egotism broke this interdependence. With disastrous consequences for the living, we now think of the dead in terms of the eliminated.» With the bond broken, only the fracture remains. It is in that crack, the space of mediums, where artificial intelligence now resides and a new consolation originates. Or not, because, as Nietzsche said, «But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world.»
