“Be Right Back” The Uncanny Valley

     The Black Mirror episode, “Be Right Back,” gave me an interesting insight on the concept of the uncanny valley. In the episode, a young couple, Martha and Ash, move into a new house that seems to be in a rural area. After they get settled into their home, Ash, the boyfriend, leaves; however, he doesn’t come back. Martha soon finds out that he has died. She doesn’t know how to take it, and her friend Sarah recommends this technologically advanced program that will let her speak to Ash although he is dead. Martha tries out 2 versions of the program: talking on the phone and talking to the “robot look alike.”
     My initial reaction was “why would she want to bring back the dead especially when she knows it’s just a robot?” After observing how she reacts to the robot, I understand why she continued with the program.  When she only heard his voice, it was like he was simply away from home but he was still there. It felt real to her, and it gave her a sort of comfort, so she upgraded to the robot look-alike. I could tell that she began to realize how weird it was for “Ash” to be back in her presence, and no matter how hard she tried to convince herself, she knew that the robot couldn’t be everything that she knew human Ash to be.
      Although the program made her feel safer and more comforting, I don’t believe it was safe or healthy at all. She basically had to cut herself off from society to be in this fantasy world where Ash was still alive, and to think that we could be walking down the halls in the future passing humanoids and not even knowing it is scary. Technological advances definitely have made society better, but robots can be physically dangerous as well as mentally dangerous. No matter how many features someone puts in a robot, it is still a piece of technology, and people will think everything’s okay until someone messes up and their robot doesn’t act how they planned.