In the Black Mirror episode, ‘Be Right Back’, a widowed wife received the opportunity to turn all her husband’s social media data into a robot that looked and spoke like her late husband. She did not have a lot of time to grieve her husband before she was exposed to the robot and this made her go insane and kick him out. He couldn’t go too far away from where he was ‘awoken’ and therefore she kept him in the attic. Although the robot clone looked like the husband, the data did not include all the human-like emotions that he had. The clone was a temporary facade that added on to the widow’s list of problems and traumas. Being that the robot clone couldn’t go far away from her foreshadowed that people can’t be too far away from the technology that they have connection to, like an invisible wire. This invisible wire has innumerable people hooked to their ‘robot’ phones, tablets and laptops. Although this episode was created in 2013, there is a close alternative today that can even try to replicate yourself if you talk to it long enough and is called ‘Replika’. Replika is an app used to chat to and it is overall gathering data to become you, so that you can relate to it. It is pretty scary to see that years later this is an option. Replika had me thinking, what if the company decides to team up with robot cloning? I think I’d like to keep my data to myself and in my brain.

Laura Johnson states, “So when it comes down to it, what makes a social network a social network is the fact that you have already made each of the relationships. Your pre established connections have been built one by one, directly by you and an online social network is where those connections can have a place to live collectively”. This reminds me of the film, “The Social Dilemma”, it explained that these social networks collect so much personal data in order to predict what ad you’d choose or whose picture you would double click on. Technology is moving a trillion times faster compared to our brains that have not evolved as much. We don’t even know how much it will affect us in the long run. AI is literally trained to know what posts we like and how to increase the interaction with the app. Essentially the technology is winning over most of our lives and it’s become a norm for this. We need to make more of an effort to stay away from the social media apps because these apps are more intelligent than us because they gather information about our digital existence to use against us. The way this world is looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Black Mirror episode is mirroring reality in a few decades.

Is technology the new human? Do you think we are too far deep to stop the machines from replacing human interaction?

Here is an article about machines with brains like ours. https://medium.com/@mishaallakhani/machines-with-brains-like-ours-an-intro-to-deep-learning-a5dff4c24e97