Written By Chiara Rossi
It looks like Black Mirror Season 6 will be brought to you by tech giant Microsoft. They were just granted the patent to reanimate dead people as 3D “chatbots.”
Microsoft’s idea is very reminiscent of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode, “Be Right Back.”
This lets Microsoft build a robot copy of anyone they please. This can include anyone from historical figures to deceased loved ones.
If this is not creepy enough, Microsoft’s AI-based cyborg version of whoever it was based on can act and think like they do.
To give further context on what was referenced above, Black Mirror is a TV series created by Charlie Brooker, who also wrote the episode mentioned earlier, “Be Right Back.”
The Black Mirror episode centers around a woman who, after losing her fiancé, decided the best way to move on is to order a man-made robot version of him (some assembly required).
Surprise, surprise, it ends badly.
Microsoft Gets Patent to Reanimate Dead People Like Black Mirror
Image: Netflix
But going back to Microsoft and what they are doing. This controversial endeavor seems to disturb more than excite the public as a whole.
In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicted that humans would go non-biological with their minds and bodies by 2045; that’s only 25 years away! So not only is that crazy, it is crazy that it has been made possible.
And the people given this mission have the resources for it.
The 1% can never get too crazy, huh? I definitely think that there is an elitist motive behind this. This service, let’s call it that for now, will only be available to the wealthy and elite.
The rest of us will either be enslaved to it or wiped out altogether. So I agree with Kurzweil when he proposed that theory. My concerns about this whole “crossing boundaries and pursue greatness” circus don’t end with that, though.
Just because Microsoft can, does not mean they should. We really don’t need a real life Black Mirror Season 6. I know humans are ambitious creatures, not disciplined ones. However, this Microsoft project is insane, even for us. If the future is bright, but it is lit only by elitist values and artificial copies of us, do we even want that?
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