Having spent the last several class periods discussing Edison’s spirit phone, Be Right Back, and attempts at immortality through AI, I’ve come to realize that all of our attempts to achieve immortality through rapidly advancing technologies have been fundamentally futile. While we have been trying to use the phonograph, photographs, videos, and now even artificial intelligence to preserve and capture ourselves, none of these efforts have come even close to truly capturing our essence.
This is not to say that we can capture some elements of ourselves and indeed it is becoming easier to capture more of ourselves as technology continues to develop. However, as Sterne describes the phonographic recording as “a resonant tomb, offering the exteriority of the voice with none of its interior self-awareness” and Rahnma describes AI as missing “context,” both hit on the essential failure of technology to holistically capture who we are in our entireties. For example, my roommates and I went down to the Charlotte Fillmore this past week to see one of our favorite artists, Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals, perform live. Now, if you go on Apple Music or Spotify, you can listen to lots of recordings of Anderson .Paak’s songs, but none of those capture the joy and energy he brings to his concerts. None of the recordings capture the collective experience of seeing Anderson .Paak live and thus none of them have the self-awareness that Sterne describes. We see a similar experience with pseudo-Ash in Be Right Back as the AI robot version of Ash fails to impress Mar because he does not adequately capture the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Ash’s personality. What exists, be it a recording on Spotify or an AI robot of our dead boyfriend, still is not the same as the real, living manifestation.
Rahnma also outlines the limitations of the AI renderings of our personalities, explaining that the digital personas created by AI are useful for counseling but do not capture the context to be legitimate replacements for our actual living selves. The AI rendered persona of a CEO, for example, is still not capable of running a company in the way that the living, breathing human being can. All told, our efforts to capture or preserve ourselves through technology render versions of ourselves that could not hold a candle to who we really are as individuals. Certainly, our efforts have improved as technology has advanced, but even with the most advanced technology at our disposal today, we have still been futile in our pursuit of immortality.