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One of the most memorable episodes of Charlie Brooker‘s terrifying social satire Black Mirror is real. “Be Right Back” features Hayley Atwell as a grieving widow who signs up for a service that uploads her dead husband Ash’s (Domhnall Gleeson) social media consciousness into a cloud service so she can text him. Eventually she becomes hooked and upgrades to a version of the cyber consciousness that lives inside an android that looks just like him. It’s a haunting look at how our online relationships can’t quite replace the real thing — and yes, it’s now real.
The Verge has a fascinating long piece about Russian engineer Eugenia Kuyda. She has succeeded in uploading her dead best friend Roman Mazurenko’s digital consciousness into a texting bot interface. Kuyda is the co-founder of Luka, an A.I. startup, and she gathered Mazurenko’s text messages and applied them to one of her company’s creations. The end result? You can text with the dead. Yes! You! If you have the Luka app, you can communicate with Mazurenko’s digital ghost in either Russian or English by messaging @Roman.
The Verge’s piece is a beautiful elegy to Mazurenko, a celebration of Kuyda’s accomplishment, and a meditation on the morality of it all. The piece even calls out the Black Mirror episode, “Be Right Back,” as a piece of inspiration. Kuyda watched it after Mazurenko’s untimely passing — he was struck in an automobile accident — and felt torn about the implications of creating a “Memorial bot.” She told The Verge: “It’s definitely the future — I’m always for the future, but is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? Where is the line? Where are we? It screws with your brain.”
Read the piece for more on Luka and the history behind @Roman.
