Black Mirror: 10 Times It Creepily Predicted The Future
6. Digitial Avatars Of The Dead
The Episode: In Be Right Back, Hayley Atwell stars as a grieving woman who signs up for a new experimental site that creates a CleverBot-esque messenger presence of her dead boyfriend (Domhall Gleeson), drawn from his social media interactions. At least that's the first stage. Later on, Atwell's character receives a complete robot replica of him.
How It Came True: In 2014, a year after the episode aired, start-up company Eterni.me emerged, offering a very similar service. Just like in Black Mirror, they can apparently form a digital semblance of a deceased person's consciousness based off their online paper trail. Its main purpose would likewise be to offer advice and guidance to grieving family members. Pitched as "Skype from the past", Eterni.me also creates a animated avatar of the deceased to go along with the messenger service.
As for the robot part of the episode, even that is being worked on. Another start-up, called Humai, has promised to resurrect a human being in just 30 years via a process of cryogenically freezing the brain and then transferring it to an artificial body.
Yep. Apparently, we've just got three decades until we're all Cybermen from Doctor Who.