The Not so Black (and white) Mirror: How immortality is intimately tangled with social inequality

 

     The first time I watched San Junipero I was a young, queer teenager trying to navigate my place in my high school--a very heteronormative, cookie-cutter space. I had always felt that I missed out, to some extent, on the glorified idea of a high school relationship. So when I watched San Junipero, it resonated with me. The episode, which is on the third season of Netflix’s satirical, tech-based drama Black Mirror, is about a young woman who is given a chance at first love after a debilitating car accident she gets into when she comes out to her homophobic parents. Later, we learn that the young lovers are actually elderly women living within a simulated reality. I was so enthralled with the sort of second-chance queer love story, that I watched the ninety-minute installment two more times shortly afterward. I felt as if I were living vicariously through the characters, Yorkie and Kelly, just as they were living vicariously through their characters in this virtual world. Eventually, Yorkie and Kelly were euthanized and became immortal, living forever in their simulated dream world.

     I had never really understood why people would want to live in virtual reality or become immortal until watching San Junipero. For marginalized communities, such as queer communities, digital spaces can give them the freedom that their family and societal structures might not provide. In fact, according to a research report by GLSEN, more than half of LGBT youth who lacked LGBT friends or support groups had found LGBT connections, resources, and support online (GLSEN). Online communities can serve as a kind of escape from repressive home environments and can offer a chance for queer people to explore and learn about their identities and live-out relationships that might not have been possible otherwise (especially for older queer people). Of course, this also has its own complications. Could this escapism into virtual reality and immortal simulations cause people to believe queer rights and sexual liberation is not necessary? Why not alter social constructs so that queer people can just have relationships in real life?

     According to Samuel Scheffler, a Berkeley philosopher, digital immortality could be appealing to marginalized communities because we are expected to go through socially constructed life stages that are intimately structured by the fact that we all have a time limit. For someone like Yorkie, and other queer people, many of these “life stages”--finding love, having a family, etc--might never happen. Of course, these socially constructed “stages” are not necessary to live a fulfilling life, but when lives do not get to reach these stages because of social discrimination or lives ending unexpectedly early, people might turn to AI and technological advancements for answers. Specifically, in The New York Times long-form, A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and A Future, Kim, a 23-year-old terminal brain cancer patient dedicates her last years towards preserving her brain in hopes of one day coming back to life. Kim and her boyfriend had planned on settling down and having children together, so when life was stripped from her before she could live out these time-enforced stages of life, she turned to cryonics.

     Perhaps for Yorkie and Kim, their fear of death was based more upon the idea of dying before they could reach all of the life stages they hoped to and having control over when we finally die rather than never dying at all. In Ever, After, Miles Klee argues that “the notion that it’s our duty to surpass the physical self complements the canards of abundance and exception that plague an (over)ambitious mind”, insinuating that there is a certain amount of privilege and entitlement that comes with wanting control over natural forces that cause us to die. Of course, an aging queer woman who just wants to fall in love for the first time and a young, dying cancer patient who wants to raise a family with her boyfriend, don’t seem like entitled people.

     Others, like Robert Bigelow, a real estate mogul, and billionaire, seem a bit more entitled in wanting to live forever. In the Times’ Can Robert Bigelow (and the rest of us) survive death?, he is so determined in his quest that he offered a million dollars to researchers who could prove consciousness after bodily death. Although Kim’s attempt at living after death did not require quite as much as a million dollars, she still had to have a relatively large degree of social capital, wealth, and/or privilege to rake up $80,000 for the cryonic process. Kim even confessed to her boyfriend, Josh, that “there’s no compelling reason why [she] deserve[s] another chance at life.” Amongst millions of worldwide cancer deaths a year, it’s impossible to decide which people should have the opportunity to live longer. In From Gene Editing to AI, How will Technology Transform AI?, scientist ____ believes that another path to living longer (“designer babies”), could easily cause a “small number of extremely healthy genetically engineered elites and a large and comparatively ill and genetically challenged underclass”. This reality seems increasingly likely as people like Kim, who can come up with the hefty charge for cryonics, will be able to live forever, and those who cannot, won’t. In fact, many of the people who are unlikely to be able to afford immortality are likely those who might “need” it the most--like marginalized communities. This same structure of inequity actually already exists to some extent, given that the lowest-income classes in America, on average, live ten to fifteen years less than the wealthiest-income classes (Harvard). So, this already existing inequity is likely to be exacerbated by rapidly developing technology that makes designer babies and immortality possible. Furthermore, wealth and life expectancy inequality is intimately tangled with social and racial inequality--so we could be looking at a not very diverse future.

     Furthermore, the potentiality for very powerful and privileged people such as Bigelow as well as Larry Page (who is on his own quest for immortality), is extremely dangerous in terms of keeping the same people in power for eternity. Klee, in Ever, After, warns of a book in which an immortal aristocrat uses the mortals as “slaves and cattle”, and deprives them of purpose to extend his reign of terror. Although quite dystopian, immortality would make already powerful people see others--mortal others--as further disposable and usable for mere capitalistic gain. Immortality seems to be driven by the biggest leaders of our capitalist society, in hopes for eternal upwards mobility. Upward mobility is a historical Western trend, especially considering histories of colonialization, pyramid-shaped social structures, and the rise of neoliberal capitalism. The urgent desire for Western society to move “forward” without much care for people and the environment is why we focus on achieving immortality instead of focusing on existing social inequalities that prevent people from living fulfilling mortal lives. Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds, a book about Native American thought, argues that because we constantly think of upward mobility “time becomes of the utmost importance” in a capitalistic society because time is essentially money.

     However, this desire to be immortal simply for capitalistic gain doesn’t seem like truly living to me. In fact, the way in which these AI and robot systems are built would make them ideal for fulfilling reward-system functions such as “infinite” money-making. But, as foreshadowed in Black Mirror’s Be Right Back episode, people who are brought back from the dead are simply not human enough. Be Right Back tells the story of a widowed woman and new mother whose partner unexpectedly dies in a car crash. She brings him back to life--so to speak--by uploading all of his digital footprints into an AI system that lives in a realistic body. At first, she only notices minor differences between the AI and her late husband, such as a missing mole on his chest. But, there are all of these data gaps in which he doesn’t remember her sister, or doesn’t react to what she says in the way that she thinks he would, or the way in which he doesn’t need to close his eyes or breathe when he sleeps. This escalates into an argument at the top of a cliff in which she tells him “You are just a few ripples of you. There is no history to you. You are just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking and it’s not enough”.

     Similar to how we cannot possibly make our instructions for AI specific enough to predict every possible outcome that could potentially go south, there is no possible way to make our instructions for an AI specific enough to be completely human. People cannot be reduced to a set of AI instructions and composed solely from our data. So although AI, may offer some people a chance to live moments of life they never had the opportunity to experience, AI and immortality will ultimately fall into the hands of the elite, who could artfully use these systems for capitalistic gain--but not much else. But, of course--it’s not as black and white.