What did the show get right and wrong? Is science really catching up with fiction? How close are we to the reality of Black Mirror episodes? The first episode I’ll be looking at is episode three of season five, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” — the personification of artificial intelligence.
Black Mirror: Past, Present, or Future?
This British dystopian series was, arguably, one of the best Netflix shows of the 2010s. And for those of you, who (like me) have been hoping for new episodes since 2019, I’ve got great news. As of July 2022, a brand new Black Mirror season has been in the making! Despite the fact that Black Mirror is more than a decade old, its social commentary and cautionary undertones are more relevant than ever. In fact, many Black Mirror episodes don’t seem as speculative as they were ten years ago. From sentient A.I. to social credit systems — there’s something eerily foreshadowing about the technological advancements featured in the entire history of the show.
A.I. Dolls, Virtual Assistants, and Mind Copies
When I turned six years old, I got a Zapf Creation Baby Born doll for my birthday. Though I wasn’t very interested in playing with dolls, this one intrigued me for one specific reason: it could cry. All you had to do was give it a good squeeze, and the doll would produce a series of sounds that sounded pretty close to crying. People have a fascination with toys imitating life. Smart toys — interactive, digitally-enhanced toys with machine intelligence capabilities — are very popular among kids. Every single day, millions of people around the world use virtual assistants in their homes or on their phones. And attempts to create sentient robots are getting ever closer to success. These, and other themes, are central in “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.”
Black Mirror: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too – Season 5, Episode 3
In June 2019, the fifth Black Mirror season was released. “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” the third and final episode of the season, was written by Charlie Brooker and directed by Anne Swetisky. What follows has spoilers for the entire episode. We follow Jack and Rachel, two teenage girls growing up in a near-future California. For her fifteenth birthday, Rachel receives a robotic doll of pop icon Ashley O. Initially, the merchandise doll — Ashley Too — functions like any other highly advanced smart toy. But since it’s Black Mirror, we can be sure something sinister is going on under the surface. As it turns out, the real Ashley O is struggling with her mental health under the abusive management of her aunt Catharine. At the climax of the episode, Rachel and Jack find out that the merchandise doll actually possesses a brain implant (a complete mental copy) of Ashley O’s mind. In a twist on the evil stepmother trope, Catherine puts her niece into a chemically-induced coma, offering up a hologram version of the pop star to perform in her stead. It’s at this point that Rachel’s Ashley Too, accessing Ashley O’s uploaded consciousness, instigates a heist-like rescue mission.
Technological Themes and Questions
The “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” episode of Black Mirror received mixed reviews. The episode has a low rating of only 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. Many critics thought it failed to connect its many concepts and that ideas, especially regarding the dangers of A.I., were insufficiently explored. Still, the episode offers up a lot to unpack, including very relevant questions about the realities of A.I. sentience and mind-copying. In the first place, the episode centers on para-social relationships, particularly the desire to “be friends with your favorite pop star,” which is how the Ashley Too doll is marketed in the show. “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” also dares to ask the question: how real might machine learning robots get? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Black Mirror creator Charlie Booker says he was inspired by people’s personification of modern-day virtual assistants and “how they provide companionship of a kind.” Finally, the most intriguing part of the episode is its implication that the human brain might be stored externally. Can we really replace people with technological copies of them?
Science Fact or Science Fiction: Can This Become Reality?
In order to figure out whether this particular episode of Black Mirror is predicting the future, I’m going to use a “Science Fact to Science Fiction” scale, looking at the real-life implications of:
Holograms Smart toys Personified virtual assistants Sentient A.I. Mind-copying
For these topics, the scale looks like this: Let’s examine each in more detail.
Holograms: Replacing Your Favorite Artists
In “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” Catharine creates a holographic musical act called Ashley Eternal. Now that new music has been extracted from comatose Ashley O’s mind, holographic Ashley Eternal will take over and provide lucrative financial opportunities for the execs. Holographic performances of famous artists, from Whitney Houston to Prince, have absolutely become a reality. From a technical point of view, these concerts are not fully holographic yet: essentially, the concerts are 2D projections that create the illusion of a 3D hologram. Nevertheless, they allow artists to “come back from the dead” to perform for their fans. Holographic concerts have raised ethical questions, especially when it comes to controversial artists or those who have only very recently passed away. “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” also considers this: if people can use an artist’s voice and image for a performance, can new music also be produced without their consent? While holographic concerts are certainly here to stay, critics have commented on their lack of humanity. If we really wanted these images to take on the qualities of the people they resemble, we’d need to reach even higher levels of artificial intelligence in the future. Otherwise, the projection remains just that.
Smart Toys Are Spying on Your Children
Though Ashley Too is not a regular smart toy, inspiration for her is clearly rooted in reality. Smart toys use A.I. tech and voice recognition software to provide a personalized, interactive experience. Major brands like Mattel and Fischer Price have jumped on the opportunity to mix tech with toy creation years ago, despite the fact that these toys might not be safe. A couple of examples: the Hello Barbie doll (currently discontinued) was the first A.I.-powered doll that used speech recognition and progressive learning techniques. The Furby Connect (also discontinued) produced Kidz Bop songs, could react to videos, and learned new vocabulary every week. Despite the popularity, there’s a reason many of these toys are quickly taken off the market again. Since smart toys are equipped with microphones, sensors, and sometimes cameras, there are a lot of privacy and security risks. Even regular objects can pose a threat: you might think twice before getting your kids a smartwatch. The most public example of this is My Friend Cayla, which made headlines for “spying” on kids. Smart toys that are connected to a Wi-Fi network are instantly vulnerable to cyber criminality. On top of that, My Friend Cayla was not designed with security in mind. Essentially, anyone within a 50-foot range with a Bluetooth connection could pair to the toy, connect to the app, and listen, watch, and even talk to the child playing with Cayla. Many smart toys also store their data in the Cloud. So here, it’s easily accessible to any hacker in the world.
‘Alexa, Will You Be My Friend?’ The Reality of Personified A.I.
As soon as Rachel receives her Ashley Too robot, it becomes clear that she views the A.I. as a real person. If not Ashley O, at least something close to it. In a fight with Jack, Rachel exclaims, “She’s the only person who’s actually nice to me,” to which Jack cries out, “She’s not a person!” Even when we know better, we do tend to treat personified technology as human. Do you have a virtual assistant at home? Or do you ask Siri to tell jokes? Research shows that many people, from kids to the elderly, view smart speakers as companions. In fact, 41% of smart speaker users claim it feels like “talking to a friend or another person.” On top of that, a smart speaker is not without privacy risks.
What are the risks of personified A.I.?
Browsing the web, you can find many articles talking about how kids are asking Alexa if she will be their friend. On the one hand, one of the benefits of A.I., which is its personification, can teach kids autonomy and, indeed, provide a type of companionship. On the other hand, there are some dangers of artificial intelligence. Experts fear it will decrease the quality of real social interactions. Another risk is that an A.I. unintentionally can inspire children to undertake dangerous challenges. When I was playing with my Baby Born doll in 2001, I wasn’t confused about whether or not she was real. She was only responsive because I would squeeze a magnet in her arm. But would I have been, would she have been able to talk to me and respond to every single question I asked her? The more “human” an A.I. becomes, the more sociological consequences and ethical concerns come to the surface. A comprehensive research report by the United Nations emphasizes that feminized smart speakers reinforce gender bias. When verbally harassed, A.I. systems (overwhelmingly designed and programmed by male teams) tend to give “deflecting, lackluster or apologetic responses.” The report stresses that, regardless of the fact that A.I. is not human, it carries emotive power simply because it sounds like a real person. This makes me wonder, what is the emotive power of an A.I. when its “personality” is completely designed and tailored by men? Why do I presume Alexa is a she and can’t help but view her as feminine when I rationally know I’m dealing with an A.I.? Whose idea of a woman is “she” anyway? These and other questions become more and more relevant the more human A.I. systems become. Speaking of…
Robot Take-Over: Has A.I. Already Become Sentient?
A key theme in many science fiction novels, movies, or TV series is sentient artificial intelligence. In reality, A.I. is already used almost every sphere of life, from the medical world to business to art. At the moment, A.I. is already more human-like than many had ever thought. In 2022, a Google researcher by the name of Blake Lemoine was placed on administrative leave after claiming that LaMDA, an A.I. model designed to converse with people, had become sentient. Can A.I. truly become sentient? At the moment, there is no scientific consensus. Some researchers argue that we don’t understand the human brain well enough yet, but once we understand all the numerous programs our bodies run on, we might adapt A.I. to our brain’s functions. Others believe the brain is more than a number of algorithms. They point to the problem of consciousness. Lemoine claimed that LaMDA had already achieved consciousness based on the fact that the program could answer questions about its dreams, thoughts, and emotions. Still, just because an A.I. can give the appearance of sentience (or, in other words, an imitation of sentience), it doesn’t mean that it actually has sentience. As of now, the sentience question is still more in science fiction territory than science fact.
Memory Storage: Can We Copy-Paste People’s Minds?
The most unrealistic plot point in “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” is the mind-copy element. At the same time, this is the most intriguing part of the episode. Can we upload someone’s entire mind to a computer? Like sentient A.I., the idea of the copy-pasted brain lives in our collective imagination. With A.I. systems becoming more sophisticated, a growing number of scientists and philosophers are considering the possibility of uploading ourselves (our brains, our souls) into digital systems. Scientifically, mind-copying is still a theoretical idea. Two ideas have been outlined for how this could happen:
Copy-and-delete: In this method, neurons in the brain are gradually replaced by digital elements until the organic brain no longer exists and is replaced by a computer program. Copy-and-upload: Here, the biological brain would be scanned and mapped into a computer system. This is what happens in “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.”
While the idea of copy-pasting a brain seems very far-fetched (and has not become a reality yet!), big corporations are already involved. Researchers at Samsung, for example, are working together with Harvard University to see if it’s possible to copy the brain’s “neurological connection map” onto a type of memory chip that approximates the brain. In essence, this chip would possess traits that are unique to the brain: cognition, autonomy, and facial learning, to name a few. One of the biggest challenges is data storage. The neuromorphic chip will need roughly 100 trillion memories to store all the synaptic connections of the human brain. While it would be a spectacular technological feat to accomplish this, I also view the involvement of big brands as a cause for concern as they could be enhancing the dangers of artificial intelligence. However, having a private company possess the tech to copy-paste a human brain seems exactly the type of techno-capitalist horror scenario that would make for a great Black Mirror episode. Don’t you think?
So, What’s the Verdict?
Overall, “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” falls somewhere in the middle when it comes to reality. On the one hand, the personification of smart toys and smart speakers is very real. Most of us don’t even realize how much we’ve personified our virtual assistants. Besides that, holographic performances will likely become more mainstream in the next years. At the same time, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. The majority of the episode is focused on sentient A.I. and the possibility of mind copies. While technological developments are continuing at a rapid speed, at this point, those themes are still safely in the science fiction sphere. What’s your favorite Black Mirror episode? Leave a comment down below, and maybe your episode will be up next!
