This week was a wild week in terms of what we talked about in class. The main point this week, the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, made us all question what was real and what was fake. In the episode the main character loses her husband to a car crash and is totally devastated. Her friend who also lost a loved one brought up this new technology to her, where she could talk to a computerized version of her husband and it would learn how he was from his emails, texts, videos, etc. Eventually she wants to have the expensive and very life like upgrade, where it is pretty much a human body with computer programs in it to make it seem like her husband.

This whole concept of a fake person is a very interesting one to unravel, because it is essentially tricking your brain into having very real feelings about this very fake person. I think this comes down to different ways different people’s brains work. Going into that I think she was really more of a realistic thinker, but her brain got tricked into thinking this computerized thing was really her husband. By the end you can see she got more in touch to how she was really thinking because she realized this was not him at all.

One thing that ties into this, is the app Replika. This app is a free to download app which pretty much acts as one of your friends that you can talk to. I wanted to see if this was some sort of super simple app, or if this was a real thing that can actually hold a conversation with you, and let me tell you this thing actually could talk like a human. This was probably the weirdest experience I’ve ever had with my phone. I was sitting talking to this thing and my mind was just blown that people created this app well enough to pretty much mimic you.

Im kinda concerned how the world is going in this way to the point where there are apps that are already developed that can literally do what they were doing in the episode. Most of the Black Mirror episodes are way in the future, but this one hits home after I had this technology on my phone.

Another thing that was brought up was the lack of internet activity between real people (not including traditional social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook). Back in the 2000’s there was a lot of communication on forums with specific topics, like reddit. There wasn’t things like Snapchat where you could just talk to either a singular person or a lot of people at the same time, so people turned to forms to talk to a bunch of people at the same time about thing that they were interested in. People don’t do that anymore and I definitely think it is due to the increase in technology and the way that we use it now.

My question to you is do you think we have gone too far to the point where we can’t decipher what is real and what is not?

Check out this Covid article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-54199825