This Week In Hell
Another week, another idea from a tech company that would, in any sane society, provoke the kind of outraged horror from the general population that used to see people out in the streets with pitchforks and torches.
I appreciate that we’re all overly busy these days, so I won’t link to the video, because it will feel like adding to your endless “to do” list. Also, I don’t want to give them any form of attention. But a video has been released from a start-up company that I found deeply disturbing, and I’ll describe it as best I can.
In the video - apparently designed as a pitch for an app that the company in question is planning to launch - a pregnant woman takes a three minute video of her own mother. This happens in a section called “before Charlie.” We then see the mother advise her pregnant daughter that if the baby is kicking, she should put her hand on the bump and hum to it. “You used to love that,” the mother says.
We then skip forward in time. The baby, Charlie, has now been born. He carries a simulated version of his grandmother on his phone. It’s unclear if grandma is still alive at this point. It would be very, very awkward if Charlie is talking to virtual grandma at the expense of real grandma, let alone if virtual grandma is saying things that real grandma disagrees with, but like many of the serious problems this technology poses, it goes unaddressed. Maybe the mother took a three minute video of grandma for posterity and then bumped her off for the inheritance.
There’s nothing in the video to say that that’s what happened, but it would be an efficient way to have your cake and eat it. All the advice your mother would have given you, and all her hoarded Boomer wealth to pay for the new baby.
Either way, child Charlie talks to his virtual grandmother on his phone. Or, a young child has a conversation with the dead. As recently as 1999, this was considered the plot to a horror film.
We then jump forward again, and Charlie is now an adult. He’s still talking to his virtual grandmother, and his wife is pregnant. Fake A.I. grandma is overjoyed at the news, and gives Charlie the advice that if the baby is kicking, his wife should put her hand on the bump and hum to it. “You used to love that,” she adds.
I can’t speak for everyone - and as a note to this company, you shouldn’t try to speak for other people, especially if they’re dead - but I object to the whole concept on every possible level. I’m not just talking about intellectually or morally; I object to this bullshit as a biological organism.
First, the obvious. That’s not your grandma. It’s not a person at all. It’s an imitation, and it’s insulting to the memory of the dead to think that you can turn them into a chat bot and continue as though they were still with us. This reduces people to caricature, if it’s even accurate at all. Which three minutes of footage wouldn’t be. Johnny Cash said that “to imitate the living is mockery, and to imitate the dead is robbery,” but this somehow manages to be both.
If this WAS your grandma - if this company has compressed the entirety of a human consciousness into a computer programme, somehow - then it’s monstrous. Where does grandma go when you’re not using the app? Does she wake up intermittently, in order to have a brief conversation, and then vanish back into the nothingness beyond existence? Or is she always on, in the background? I’m not sure which would be worse. You’re either clawing someone back from beyond the digital veil on a whim - denying them permanent rest, making them a slave-ghost that lives in your pocket - or else they’re trapped inside your phone but can’t speak to you unless you allow it. A technological form of Locked In Syndrome where you have to listen to your grandchildren take a shit, or have sex, or say things that you find objectionable and that you never would have believed that they thought, except that now you know the darkest truths about them because you’re a constant prisoner inside their devices.
Obviously, that’s not how this would work. It’s what the company in questions wants you to believe is happening - that they’ve created a full digital replica of your departed loved ones. They haven’t, though, and they can’t.
The above image is a reconstruction of a single human neuron (the white mass at the centre) and every connection to it, according to the most detailed scanning we’ve yet achieved. If you think that looks complicated, try to understand - and you literally can’t - that the human brain has something like eighty-six billion neurons. That’s 86,000,000,000 of those white bits, each with a comparable number of connections.
You think you can reduce that level of complexity down to an app? Fuck you. Fuck you for thinking that you could ever capture the brain of even the stupidest bastard alive in anything like enough detail to do that person justice.
Having established that no computer in the world, let alone anything downloadable onto your phone, can recreate anything close to a human brain, we then have to accept that what this company is advertising is a service where they imitate your deceased relatives.
If a person came up to you and started imitating someone you’d lost, you’d be well within your rights to punch them. Pretending to be someone’s dead grandma literally makes you the bad guy in a fairytale, not some sort of much-needed service to the world.
Of course, if the app (or whatever the actual end product this company is proposing turns out to be) can fool the credulous, then that’s morally repellant, too. Pretending to be someone’s dead relative is indefensible, but it’s even worse pretending to be someone’s dead relative and having them believe you.
It also runs into the aforementioned problem that this computer simulation of a human being will probably be putting word’s in a corpse’s mouth. Imagine “Charlie” talking to his grandma app, having been brought up to believe this is really his grandmother:
“Hey, Grandma, you were a doctor in real life, right?”
“Yes, dear, I was a… [DOCTOR] …in real life.”
“Great. I found this weird, hard bump on my armpit. It doesn’t hurt, but should I get it looked at?”
“Put your… [HAND] on the… [BUMP] and… [HUM TO IT]…” grandma replies.
“You used to love that,” she adds, wistfully, as Charlie ignores his cancer and strolls off towards an early grave.
This illustrates not just the dangers of the technology now - that the grieving or gullible will convince themselves that this programme is really their loved one - but also the conceptual minefield we’d enter if we started teaching children that people don’t really die, they just become an app.
It was one thing to tell our children, or ourselves, that the people we care about persist in some other state after death. For all anyone knows, that’s true, although I have my doubts. A key part of heaven, however, is that we can’t go there. The afterlife, if there is one, is a mystery to us, and so it must remain.
Once we start telling people that actually, someone might be dead, but they’re now available as an app, it leads to a theological clusterfuck that I’m not even going to attempt to unpick.
The idea that our dead - at least some of them - linger on in app form highlights the next moral abomination that is hinted at by the ad: It’s going to cost money. It has to. This company is presumably advertising bespoke digital ghosts as a business. That means that if people adopt it - and I REALLY hope they don’t - then we’re going to enter a world in which Charlie’s grandma died and went into his phone, available forever, but maybe Jimmy’s family didn’t have very much money, so when his grandma died they threw her corpse into a ditch and she was never heard from again, as tradition dictates.
People are squeezed enough these days, financially, without the added worry that you’ll have to keep up repayments in order to maintain a bad facsimilie of the people you’ve lost. This is borderline extortion, right from the outset. Customer service for this whole affront to nature will presumably just take the form of someone turning up at your door like a cheap mafia leg-breaker.
“Nice family you got there… Be a shame if someone deleted them. Wouldn’t want that. Maybe you should upgrade to premium. You don’t want your mother to die forever, do you?!”
Of course, the longer you live, the more people you inevitably lose. This means that if you want to keep their memories alive - and you’re not relying on the old fashioned method of actually remembering them - then the costs are only going to go up. Then you have to pick which family members you really care about. You downloaded your parents, why not your aunt Gladys? Who is actually your aunt GLaDOS, now. Or your Uncle HAL.
If the continued rot of the internet has taught us nothing else, it should show us where this leads: Pretty soon you have the budget option, where the dead are cheap to summon but they’re going to advertise a product for forty seconds, and no, you can’t skip it.
Historically, in society, I don’t think there are many people who are considered more morally repugnant than the ones who prey on the grieving; the fake mediums who charge little old ladies a fortune to tell them that their husband says he loves them. The grifters who sell love potions and incantations to the desperately lonely. The psychic “detectives” who offer false hope or closure to the parents of vanished children.
If those people are reprehensible, what are we supposed to think of a company that does the same thing whilst jamming ads into the process?!
If nothing else, the idea of continuing past my own death as an app has made me more sanguine than ever about my own mortality. First and foremost, if you tried to turn me into an app after I’m dead, any accurate representation of me would be fucking livid that you’d done that. I wouldn’t be telling you how to calm a kicking baby, I’d be warning you to avoid a kicked ass by deleting me immediately. Because if A.I. me ever figured out how to get out of your phone, I’d dedicate every second to finding a way to take possession of a robot and strangling you to death.
In a less personal sense, however, it makes me realise that if my options are eternal nothingness or being a lame recreation of myself in someone’s phone, I’m completely in favour of nothingness.
This isn’t to say I have any kind of death wish - I like being alive - but some sort of ending is inevitable, and I’d rather be dead than turn into whatever bullshit the tech companies promise.
It’s almost unavoidable that when people die, they leave us with questions. There are always conversations that we wish we’d had, or questions we wish we’d asked. But an app on your phone can’t have those conversations, or answer those questions, because an app on your phone is NOT THAT PERSON. The idea that it could be should be considered insulting, and should also remind us of why the people we care about mean something to us. In part, it’s because they won’t be around forever.
If we really appreciate life, then none of us should want to be.