Digital humans give me the creeps – but there might be something in it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/digital-humans-deceased-avatar-black-mirror

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I'll admit that while watching Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, I had a cold, eerie feeling of prescience that one day it might come true – the dystopian satire was too closely pegged to modern technological reality not to. When I heard the news that start-up company Eterni.me was planning to give humans the chance to live "for ever" through the creation of computerised versions of the deceased, I felt abject horror.

How I wish scientists and technologists would give up this race to create convincing human simulacra – let's face it: the atavistic shudder they provoke will never dwindle. These automatons of artificial skin will never not be uncanny, even if (especially if) they have your mum's face. And also: who needs science? If I wanted to hang out with a pretend human being who falls short emotionally, I'd just call up one of my exes.

This is, incidentally, exactly what Hayley Atwell's character does in the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, which has now become reality (small mercies: at least it wasn't the episode featuring the prime minister and the pig). Following the death of her boyfriend, she engages a company to provide her with a new one, comprised of all his social media postings. Then she grows him in the bathtub, his computer brain residing in an alarmingly real-yet-waxy looking body. Predictably, her android sweetheart is incapable of feeling love and, much like anyone whose identity is crafted uniquely from Facebook statuses, inevitably becomes a bore (though it has to be said that he isn't bad in the sack). Eventually she is forced to get rid of him.

Back in reality, Eterni.me's 3D digital avatar is remarkably similar; a computerised presence that will attempt to copy the personality of the deceased but storing up all the data held within the emails, photos, and social media postings made during the person's lifetime.

So far, so creepy and melancholy. All of us know, deep down, that a human being is not the sum total of their social media posts. It is friends and family members who will remember a person's wit, or intelligence, or clumsiness, their empathy and their capacity for love; a public persona can do this no justice. And, apart from perhaps the very young with their #nofilter impulses, the lives that most of us live online are largely public personas. Indeed, one elderly lady this week said she would rather die than adapt to this world of robots who "lack humanity".

Anyone who has lost someone close to them will know instinctively that an Eterni.me avatar could never compete with the person that they knew and loved, nor is having one likely to help the grieving process. But, on one level, I do think there might be something in it. A better way to understand the project, according to its creator, is to view the technology as akin to a Google search of your knowledge and experience, allowing people to benefit from anything that you know, thus preserving your legacy. Holding on to such knowledge would not only be useful when it comes to conserving the work and observations of society's great thinkers and geniuses, but could have implications for all of us.

The worst thing about losing my grandfather was what I hadn't asked him, and all the things that he told me that I have since forgotten: what that judge said in Barnsley in the joke he used to tell, how to make Mrs Cambruzzi's spaghetti, what that war poem was called. A digital memoir would allow me to find out, and I would have no objections to its existence provided it was created with the consent of the person and they gave up this ludicrous idea of attempting to give it a human face. But then again, how much does this information matter? A human's mark on the world is the emotions and memories they invoke in others, and, for me at least, a recipe for spaghetti means very little when the person you love is not there, smiling as they share it.