General Question

LeavesNoTrace's avatar

What is this technology? Does this thing even exist?

Asked by LeavesNoTrace (5677points) June 9th, 2013

My friend recently turned me on to this Channel 4 series called The Black Mirror and I really like it. It’s kind of a Twilight Zone-esque show that deals with possible future technologies and their potential consequences.

One episode follows a woman whose boyfriend dies and she decides to deal with her grief by using an app that recreates him digitally using his social media footprint and voice recordings of him to make her feel like she’s having a real conversation with the deceased. Eventually, she decides to order a fully-formed, adult clone of him who has been programmed with his physical characteristics and mannerisms. Needless to say, it has some interesting consequences.

Anyway, my friend also mentioned that there is a real technology out now that allows people to work through their grief by using the social media footprint of the dead. This one sounds a little healthier and more realistic—it taps into all the places you have ever “checked in” on social media with the person and creates a “memory map”. They then send you a pattern to stitch a memory quilt of sorts to commemorate all of the fun things you did together, which sounds like it could be a nice and productive activity to help heal grieving people.

Has anyone ever heard of this? What do you think? Cool or weird?

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10 Answers

flo's avatar

Wouldn’t it also make it that much harder to have closure and moving on to the next chapter of your life? It sounds it could become an addiction.

XOIIO's avatar

it would be possible, although extremely difficult, to make a chat bot like a pandora bot using samples of stuff from social media sites.

LeavesNoTrace's avatar

@flo Absolutely, that was my first reaction and the show definitely shows the consequence of her going that route. I won’t give spoilers but she learns a hard lesson the hard way.

What about the “memory quilt”? Has anyone heard of that? I keep Googling but no dice. What do you think of that? It’s not an option for me since my Mother didn’t use social media but it could be cool for someone else.

flo's avatar

No never heard of it.

glacial's avatar

I think it’s kind of a terrible idea. First of all, the person who died didn’t know anyone was going to do this to his social media history, so it’s a huge intrusion on that person’s privacy – it shows no respect. Secondly, there are bound to be all kinds of little mysteries introduced by the parts of the internet footprint that are surprising to the person who is left with it. How do you not become obsessed with figuring all of that out? I don’t think this could be a good way to heal.

LeavesNoTrace's avatar

@glacial Good point. I guess I didn’t think about it from that perspective if we’re both talking about the memory quilt.

I was under the impression that it only scraped data from publicly-posted “check-ins” of places you went together.

glacial's avatar

@LeavesNoTrace Oh, I see – and you even wrote that in your details.

I guess it still sounds weird to me. I mean… I think I would find it creepy if someone made a map like that of my check-ins with them while I was still alive. I’d probably find it even creepier if I knew they would do it after I’d died. Suddenly glad I have check-ins disabled on fb

LeavesNoTrace's avatar

@glacial

Hmm I could see it having other uses as well besides death and grief. Maybe a couple could use it to commemorate places they’ve traveled together. For example, my boyfriend and I have done a fair amount of international travel together so I think ours would be kind of interesting.

But that’s just my $0.02

RE Grief: It’s a weird thing.

glacial's avatar

@LeavesNoTrace Yeah, I think the key is that if the other person knows about it, then great. Otherwise, hmmmm. It does sound like an interesting idea for a couple.

antimatter's avatar

I think the cloning makes better sense but the memory engrams is a bit science fiction. After all the only thing that stands between real human clones is moral and religious objection. But you may never know perhaps there are already a few clones among us. Somewhere someone may have already cloned someone in some top secret facility.

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