One of the episodes that resonates the most is the Re-Do one.
It's literally what Altered Carbon is about, something like a few decades before the tech needed to give you perpetual life, such as they describe it, would be developed.
In those early days when everyone (just about) can access their every living memory the way kids play with SnapChat now. The next big thing would be an app that captures a scene and allows you to edit it. Doing that with fingertips on a tiny screen isn't likely but there are devices that are nearly ready for the consumer market that could make it happen. Getting AI that can understand everything and index everything so that you can easily edit it all with accurate context will be very interesting.
Drawing from that though you already see the issue. The show describes Re-Dos as a replacement for squidgy normal memories.. yet for the purposes of the story they are telling, you're pulling up THX versions of your memories and not the Re-Mixes (actual term) you'd expect people to have stored. Why play with real memories which have to remain sacrosanct, when you can play with and recall and share remixed, idealized versions.
In all likelyhood you'd have the core memory and one or more re-mixes.
The story would have been complicated with that detail so it's great they ran with the Re-Dos as just replays.
So I wondered, given that each episode so far seems grounded in tech that's already here, just how far we are from everyone having and heavily using their grians. Feels like some people would get lost in their own and the memories of others. Where the show fleetingly mentions memory theft and the probability that people get hooked on the THX versions of the highlights of other people's lives. How much would those even be worth?
Snap, Insta, and Facebook, and their various analogs are something like the apps that let people remix and share for free. You just watch the ads. While Flikr, Google Photos etc just want you to store everything. Typically those free services don't have ads.
Why?
I have so many years of screenshots and other things backed up in Google Photos and despaired a while back of actually ever being able to index it all (fingers and tiny screens). That's something that that Black Mirror's non serialized, thus episodic nature doesn't have time to cover. Just noticed that Google's Auto Backup app is now gobbling up files larger than 2GB (which was the automatic backup limit for a few years, but I've been getting around it by forcing it to accept files up to 8-10GBs each).
Why is this important?
Well the typical upload is anything that hits my downloads folder on my phones. Mostly those screenshots. That means they are indexed based on the date they were gobbled up and little else for context. Even so I have been able to find things up a few times. Just details like names and such.
The amount of data backed up versus what I'd be able to recall just from my own index of when things happened and how to find them in that backup.. makes me roll my eyes at the possibility of these systems working effectively for people with crappy memories like mine, even when augmented by a storage service as robust as Google Photos.
Thankfully Google offers help in the form of their robust Search features. You can give it a plain English description of what you're looking for and it will show relevant results. And their variations/re-mixes. And how can you manage your life if YOU had to alter your recollection of a thing such that you rely on that remix so completely or you rely so completely on an event being deleted from your life.. that facing the original memory again shatters your entire perception of things. How as a friend do you live with both at the same time and tip toe around the real memory while maintaining the remix for the sake of a friends sanity? Like if your friend got a divorce and wiped all traces of that segment of their life out. If there where other details in there, entire friendships intertwined in that marriage.. you start to have trouble cleaning your backups because they might have things you actually do want to recall later. How devastating it would be to lose that all. Like an entire decade of your life.
Another thing that's missing is that AI assistance along with the substantial backup of real events and remixes.
If that AI is always with you, it will carry an even more effective index because it will have that running context, the timeline. The show does indicate that there's AI behind the scenes.. but it comes off as an afterthought. How important is the Timeline and continuity of it. Right now your CV's timeline is pretty important because gaps are red flags to employers. What happens when potential romantic partners want to and typically will judge you based on the integrity of your timeline.
I find it really absurd that that episode didn't emphasis that people would want to deep dive the critical things that could implode a relationship.. up front. And not just glossing over the details the way we do so now if anything is shared at all.
The show does however emphasis that the de-emphasizing of things you did actually share can get you a pass but the risks are still there and that's why such technology should exist, you'll have perfect recall when a time for reckoning comes.
So that third thing might be other people. What happens when your Timelines don't quite sync up.
For most of the last few years I've been into livestreaming, first on Twitch and then on Bigo. Being that hovering presence it started to feel like I'm a memory helper for other people. The broadcaster and regulars became these sources of other memories, content and context that had to be indexed.. like I'd be reminding them what they were doing and should be doing.
I've been really keen on livestreaming my entire life because it felt, in my childhood, like there's plenty of people with little else to do than watch TV. Why watch mind numbing TV when you can be pseudo present and actually useful to someone else who's willing to share their life with you and others. Its spreads the burden of memory and morality out to their audience in a sense because you can always ask them all questions and if they remember things that were shared during the broadcast.
Putting that extra layer on that Black Mirror episode (which unsurprisingly was actually the subject of a subsequent episode) would have been interesting.
Could you have a silent unbiased audience watch the activities in your life play out like a serial television drama? It's practically happening already. But that's passive. How can you live your life if everything was not just backed up in THX quality, but also instantly shared with 10s of thousands or millions of paying viewers?