The Next Black Mirror Movie
By: Bj Campbell
Tags: Sex, AI, Culture, Random

There’s an episode of the UK TV Show “Black Mirror” called Be Right Back, where a grieving widow uses an online service that builds an AI profile of her deceased husband. It texts to her, talks to her on the phone, and such, and eventually she orders this AI of her dead husband installed into a robot. The robot emulates her husband in every way, even sexually. But in typical Black Mirror style, it gets creepy and the episode focuses on the idea that we can have emotional attachments and interpersonal relationships with machines, and such. In some ways, it’s a bit like the article I wrote here, about my experiences monitoring and shutting down my wife’s social media accounts after she passed away:

This Black Mirror episode strikes me very deeply because I would have the same conundrum as the main character, and I don’t know what I would do in that conundrum. I don’t think I’d buy the AI now, but I probably would have then.

As I think more about the plot of that Black Mirror episode, and I look at the state of both the internet around me, the world at large, and the state of the modern human condition, I think the episode missed a very important conclusion. If mankind had that technology, we as a species probably wouldn’t be using it to assuage our anguish over losing a relative like the main character did, or like I might have. Mankind would use it to fuck.

Fuckbots and Infidelity

Follow me through a thought experiment, where that particular Black Mirror universe was real. The company has a product where they can take social media, emails, voicemails, and all the collective information gathered about us by Google or similar megacorporate information gathering agencies, and can emulate humans to a nearly precise degree. They obviously wouldn’t market this product to widows and widowers. There aren’t enough of us. They’d market it to everyone. And the buyers wouldn’t be emulating their loved ones, lost or living. They’d be emulating themselves.

It would be nice to have a robot to answer the door for you at your house, that looked like you, acted like you, and managed the house in the same way as you. It would be nice to have a robot that does the dishes. It would be nice to have a robot that did your work for you. But the robot in Black Mirror also had sex. If every person in the world who ever had an urge to have an extramarital relationship also had the ability to replace themselves with a robot, that was so good at emulating them that their partner wouldn’t even notice, they’d never get caught. They could drop the robot into their lives, sneak out, and have all the extramarital sex they liked, if they were the kind of person who was so inclined.

But what if their partner was doing the same thing?

And this is where Black Mirror really missed an opportunity to make a deeper, weirder, stranger episode. Herein, witness my pitch for the overarching storyline of the next full-length Black Mirror Movie feature film, to hit theaters whenever they open from Covid.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Dildos?

Our main character, Adam, is a husband driven to cheat by his wife Evelyn’s disaffection. He connects with a woman online, Satin, meets her at a coffee shop, and is hesitant about crossing the line of infidelity. Satin assures him that it will be safe, he just has to buy a synthetic replacement for himself, by the Forbidden Fruit Corporation (we can’t call it Apple unfortunately for trademark reasons) which will replace him while he’s seeing Satin on their affair. He does so, and uploads all his relevant information into the Forbidden Fruit database. It generates an AI to install into the robot that will emulate him completely. The Forbidden Fruit End User License Agreement reserves the right to retain any information he provides, and he doesn’t read it because nobody reads those things. Mission successful, bot is in place, and he partakes in a sordid sexual encounter with Satin while Evelyn is none the wiser. Everybody loves love scenes. Put some throwbacks to Fatal Attraction in the backdrop.

Adam returns home, wracked with guilt, but tries to go about his daily routine with Evelyn. Eventually he starts noticing suspicious things about Evelyn’s behavior, things that just don’t seem quite right. He talks with Satin about them, because he now suspects that his wife may be cheating on him, and using a robot to cover her own infidelity. But he struggles with how to confront her about it, or even if he should considering he is now a philanderer. Satin does her best to calm him, assuring him that he is just imagining things, and invites him out for coffee. Adam again replaces himself with the robot, meets Satin, they talk, things get sexy, and they return to Satin’s apartment and we have the movie’s next love scene.

This time, though, the scene is a split scene, because Adam’s replacement robot is having sex with Evelyn, which makes the scene twice as hot, as well as twice as weird as the camera bounces back and forth between each bedroom.

Now we pivot completely over to Evelyn, which the movie has not focused on much to this point, as she has a conversation with her workout friend Lilith at her spin class. Evelyn expresses disaffection in her own marriage, and Lilith recommends she buy a Forbidden Fruit robot so she can go “find herself.” She does so, goes through the same motions Adam went through in an abridged fashion, installs her robot into their marriage and sneaks off to hit the dance clubs. The scene as she’s leaving shows the robot interacting with Adam, but it’s the same scene the movie opened with from a different camera angle.

The viewer draws multiple implications at this point. Adam’s original disaffection with Evelyn may not have been with Evelyn at all, perhaps it was with a robot. And the “twice as hot” scene above involved a sexual encounter not between a woman and a robot, but between two robots.

Next, we see Lilith and Satin having a glass of wine at a bar, talking about their weekly conversion ratios and their Forbidden Fruit stock options. Towards the end of this conversation, it becomes clear that both are Forbidden Fruit Marketing Robots.

You get the idea I think. Turtles All The Way Down and such. Any talented writer could carry this to wherever they wanted to go. It could turn into a dystopian nightmare where the entire human race is systematically replaced by fuckbots because we failed to control our primal urges and allowed the technology of gratification to consume our minds. We could discover that Forbidden Fruit is in fact run by an AI, the Grandmaster Fuckbot of them all. We could see Adam and Evelyn both discover the terrible truth and go on an action filled spree of violent terror against their fuckbot overlords like in “They Live.” Perhaps we discover that Adam and Evelyn are in fact the only two remaining humans, and that the entire world is being acted out in a strange script by machines simply doing what we, the humans who so foolishly bit from the tree of knowledge, created to replace us. Perhaps Adam and Evelyn are reunited in their violent reign of terror against Forbidden Fruit and move off to an island to try and make the first new human baby of the new world.

Date Movie

Let’s extend our thought experiment and pretend you took your boyfriend or girlfriend to see this movie on your first date, and that your date is an intelligent, interesting person, and clearly not a fuckbot. You go for drinks afterwards.

Your conversation opens with the obvious “fuckbots are evil” lesson; they are fruits of thousands of years of technology flowing from Eve biting the Apple of Knowledge. A harder lesson may be that gratification of primal urges through technology is itself unhealthy. That perhaps traditional value systems which suppress the gratification of primal urges succeed in building societies that work, where gratification-based value systems fail on some historical “axis of approximated metaphorical fuckbot.” An even tougher one may be that automation itself is evil, because it knows no bound, and somewhere within that bound of automation lies the entirety of human experience. Once the entire experience is automated, nothing remains. That our addiction to technology is itself an addiction to becoming steadily less human, until there are no humans left.

And then you and your date decide to go to church together.