Love Is A Drug

Black Mirror on Love, Grief and Letting Go

M. D. Kwak

TO BE HUMAN IS TO GRAPPLE WITH THE SOUL-CRUSHING REALITY THAT IS DEATH. As individuals and cultures, we’ve created rituals that accompany death, in the hopes that its sorrowful emptiness will be made the slightest bit more bearable.

The coffin being lowered down into a grave.

Then the solemn eulogy and prayer. 

And for weeks, months or even years, there’ll be the spontaneous gaze at tear-stained photographs,

– the replay of bittersweet videos that hold memories of an age-old past.

We all grieve in different ways. Some people bury themselves in the monotony of work or the numbing busyness of life. Others don’t come out of their room for weeks, instead basking in the rose-tinted warmth of the past. Many are paralysed by the crushing anxiety of the future – a future where their loved one is no longer beside them. Grief is soul-shattering, and despite thousands of years of cumulative experience with it, humans haven’t really figured out how to make the process any better.

My favourite Black Mirror episode, Be Right Back, portrays a future where technology serves as the band-aid to those metaphysical wounds. AI processes the memories, social media data and private information of deceased individuals and mimics their appearance, personality and behaviour. What starts off as an AI chatbot turns into a phone call, then into a full body replicant – an autonomous, physical being that you can talk to, hold in your arms and share your life with, almost as if they never even died in the first place.

But love is a drug, perhaps the most powerful one there is. It becomes a drug when we would give up everything to have just one more conversation with them, share just one more hug or laugh with them just one last time. And just as with the case of drug addicts, it doesn’t get any easier to give up the people we love – especially when we have already felt their harrowing absence. The people who will use this technology are those who are most familiar with and most terrified of the feeling of waking up alone. This is why this AI, if it existed, would be profoundly addictive and near impossible to switch off.

The problem with this is that no matter how advanced this AI becomes, no matter how many algorithms it runs or machine learning it undergoes, it will never be good enough. It will never bring back the person who has died because it is fake and inauthentic and merely a replication. You’ll be talking to it, and suddenly it won’t be able to recognise a memory that wasn’t uploaded to its cloud. Its responses will feel slightly out-of-character, its personality will increasingly diverge from the set of input data as time passes.

Or maybe it’ll feel too perfect; it’ll be too eager to fulfil your needs. It’ll recall memories that you had long forgotten, or act in ways that seem too robotically perfect for the imperfect person you once argued with and cried over and loved dearly (after all, don’t we only document our best moments whilst conveniently forgetting about the dysfunctional aspects of our personality?).

Above all, you will always know that they are not the real person and even though on the surface, you might convince yourself that they are, you will grow to dislike the person that you have created but feel responsible and tied to them all at once. You will realise that they are inauthentic, that they can’t replace a real-life person, but you can’t bring yourself to say goodbye because they would look at you and beg you to not turn them off.   

This technology might circumvent grief, but it does so by keeping individuals at its first stage: denial. And if individuals rebuild the broken pieces of their life using this denial, their existence will be tenuous and disconnected from reality. The AI would be a perpetual reminder of the loss of their person: a drug that suspends you in a horrifying limbo of grief and trauma, rendering you incapable of escaping or forgetting the most painful memories and emotions of your life.

Yes, maybe it is slightly regrettable that grieving people reach out and form new relationships to alleviate their grief. But when they date a new person or have a new child, the actual consequence of that is that it makes it that much easier for people to get over their loss. It is far better to move on with a new person because they are an actual, real person who is able to morally develop and push back on you, challenge you, and cherish and love you in ways an AI replicant never will.