Black Mirror: fiction or future?

Islamabad: Black Mirror is a Netflix series which has received much critical acclaim and has successfully created its own universe with its own movie called Bandersnatch, along with hordes of fans of the series that are on their toes for the next batch of episodes to come out. The reason the franchise is so successful is because of the almost hyper realistic parody like art-form the episodes take on, where the worst parts and extremes of technology are depicted. With every episode leaving you genuinely thinking whether technology is moving at a healthy pace, excited to the future, or just wishing to move out into the middle of no where to avoid even the slightest chance of a future as shown in the series. The question is however how slight is the chance? We think not very at all.

Replaceable partners

One of the episodes of the series namely Be Right Back sees a woman whose boyfriend dies, and she misses him insanely, so she does what any loving partner would do. Order an identical robot to her boyfriend who has the same memories as him, based on her boyfriend’s social media. Now this may seem like a stretch if one looks at this episode as a whole but the components of it already are very much around us. You can already see how far marketed ads have come with you only needing to glance at something on your phone for longer than a few seconds for the AI handling ads to give you thirty suggestions to something similar. The second component is the robot itself – this year a UK lab unveiled Ameca the most advanced robot to date that, albeit, has an iRobot appearance and gets human expressions down to the T as well as having facial features that shouldn’t need to be this realistic. Now as we’re moving forward, human interaction is already getting replaced by machine learning and some form of technology – this can be seen from automated phone receptionists, and it is sad to think of a future where you can have partners kids and friends that you can order online, and much scarier to think that someone could have your likeness ordered to their specifications.

The future of parenting

The episode Arch Angel depicts how a controlling mother puts a chip inside her daughter to not only see where she is and what she sees but to also censor material that can be considered to be untoward. This is not far off reality with many helicopter parents tracking their children’s phones to see where they are and also using multiple browser extensions and paid services to ensure that even when their children are surfing the web, they do not run into something their parents would not approve of. This coupled with how far chip tech is coming with embedded chips being used to open doors, control phones and a plethora of other functions it is not a far stretch to suggest that soon human embedded chips will be the new norm and they may have services that can and will allow parents to micromanage their children’s lives.

They are watching you

Now the first two examples have been sort of far fetched claims, and are mostly just speculations. However, Black Mirror also gets into the extremes of technology we already have and are using. The episode Shut Up and Dance comes to mind where, a boy’s computer gets hacked, and he gets recorded while watching some explicit content on his computer. This leads to the hacker having them do insane tasks in order for the video not to get leaked. The technology for this already exists, it only takes a deep dive into YouTube to find the Indian hacker videos where they basically take control of your screen. Such malware is also the reason many newer laptops come with a camera covering option Fact of the matter is that hacking is around us and many of us live out our lives ignoring the Windows Defender prompt of viruses on our PC, what is scarier is that the newer spyware is so discreet that you could already have it on your computer and never find out. So, our advice is grab that roll of masking tape and go ham on that camera.

Hot or not but its real life

The episode Nosedive has been the talk of the town following the new Chinese policy to rate their citizens and afford them benefits according to their rating. This idea is still wild and so hard to imagine, it makes it seem like China is some Orwellian novel. Rating people is nothing new to humanity and even on the internet, as the title of this part suggests there was an app called hot or not which would let you rate how attractive people are. However, with the app there were no real benefits or disadvantages beyond an inflated or deflated self-esteem. All in all the future seems pretty bleak if such is the case as in the article for it would be hard to tell when someone is being genuine with you or faking it for the rating. The extremes of this concept are also explored in the anime PsychoPass where people are rated as criminals or non-criminals by society and dealt with accordingly, even jobs are allotted based on your rating.

The future is an uncertain and scary place, humans have also historically been wrong about guessing the direction technology will take and Black Mirror episodes coming to life proves just that.

Black Mirror, Bandersnatch, Be Right Back, Arch Angel, Shut Up and Dance, Nosedive