In the last two weeks we've watched episodes from Black Mirror. The first episode was called White Bear and it deals with punishment. To specify, the form of punishment represents the code of Hammurabi, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." It makes the punishment match the injury. The woman involved in the kidnapping and murder of a little girl had to endure suffering similar to what the little girl went through. The only thing is the woman's memory is erased everyday so that she has to experience the torment again. This raises the question, when will the punishment end and more importantly how can the woman learn her lesson if her memory is constantly being erased.
The next episode, Be Right Back, deals with something less disturbed. However, it can be a little creepy. When a woman's fiance dies, she can't handle the loss and resorts to using a program ,recommended by a friend at the funeral, that allows her to still talk to her lover through technology. Before long she becomes attached to the program and even springs for a synthetic version of her dead fiance. She was pleased with it because it reminded her of her fiance. However, this didn't last because the program didn't have spontaneous reactions like the original person. She had to constantly tell it what her fiance would usually do. In the end, she had to keep the program and it now lives in the attic of her home. This movie deals with the uncanny valley. The program became so much like the genuine that it was seemingly real. The program was creepy because it was supposedly a dead man brought back from the dead. I'm sure at one point the woman forgot that her lover was dead. This is how scary technology can be at times. What will happen once people start using fully robotic duplicates of themselves?
As it was discussed in class, most people argued that what made the new Ash creepy and different from the old Ash is his ability to set goals for himself and create new traits for itself. While I do agree with this to a certain extent, I believe it would not be too hard to recreate this goal setting trait that makes humans so "special". Personally, I believe since humans are physical beings, composed of elements like anything else, then since cyborgs are made from the same material, there is no stopping humanity from recreating the human psyche in an artificial life form. Moreover, who is to say that eventually these free thinking AI's will become just another normal part of society. While it may seem far fetched, I feel that if a person was brought up with cyborgs already around them, they wouldn't question it in the least.
ReplyDelete