One of the threads running through the sci-fi series’ latest season concerns digital versions of ourselves who live on after we die … it could happen sooner than we think

When Roman Mazurenko was struck down by a car and killed just before his 33rd birthday, his “soulmate” Eugenia Kuyda memorialised him as a chatbot. She asked his friends and family to share his old text messages and fed them into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup, Replika.

“I didn’t expect it to be as impactful. Usually I find showing emotions and thinking about grief really hard so I was mostly trying to avoid it. Talking to Roman’s avatar was facing those demons,” she told the Guardian.

Kuyda discovered that talking to the chatbot allowed her to be more open and honest. She would head home after a party, open the app and tell him things she wouldn’t tell her friends. “Even things I wouldn’t have told him when he was alive,” she said.

In the next three decades almost 3 billion people could leave their digital remains in the hands of technology companies

The chatbot, documented in great detail by the Verge, might be a crude digital resurrection, but it highlights an emerging interest in the digital afterlife, and how technology such as artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces could one day be used to create digital replicas of ourselves or loved ones that could live on after death.

It’s a topic that Black Mirror returns to repeatedly, extrapolating from current technologies into characteristically dystopian scenarios where our brains can be read, uploaded to the cloud and resurrected digitally as avatars or robots.

Two episodes in the latest season explore the idea of making a digital copy of a person’s consciousness: USS Callister and Black Museum. In the former, a disgruntled game developer makes sentient virtual clones of his co-workers, who he punishes inside a Star Trek-esque game. In the latter, there are several subplots that chart the evolution of devices that can interface with the brain to enable the sharing and replication of sensations, thoughts and emotions. In one, a convict on death row signs over the rights to his digital self, and is resurrected after his execution as a conscious hologram that visitors to the museum can torture.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Who wants to live forever? Black Museum Photograph: Jonathan Prime / Netflix

Long-time fans learning about Kuyda’s chatbot will be reminded of 2013 episode Be Right Back, where a woman called Martha subscribes to a service that uses the online communications of her dead fiance Ash to create a digital avatar that echoes his personality. What starts as a text-messaging bot evolves into a voicebot before she upgrades to a premium service where the bot is embedded in a robot doppelganger. The robot turns out to be a hollow approximation of Ash, and Martha consequently rejects it, stating: “You’re not you, you’re just a few ripples of you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.”

Even with the best in today’s artificial intelligence and robotics techniques, we lack the technical capabilities to make anything as sophisticated as an Ashbot, let alone any of the conscious replicants in USS Callister or Black Museum.

“The human mind is virtually unexplored. We have no idea how consciousness works. But the brain is still a machine so it’s a matter of tinkering with it until we work it out,” says transhumanist Zoltan Istvan, who has studied live extension and digital immortality.

Eter9, created by Portuguese software developer Henrique Jorge, is a social network that uses artificial intelligence to learn from its users and create a virtual self, called a “counterpart”, that mimics the user and lives on after he or she dies.

Similarly Eterni.me, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, scrapes the posts and interactions on your social media accounts to build up a digital approximation that knows what you “liked” on Facebook or bragged about on LinkedIn. The service has yet to launch, but the plan is to allow people to interact with their dead loved ones via Eterni.me’s mobile apps.

“We want to preserve for eternity the memories, ideas, creations and stories of billions of people. Think of it like a library that has people instead of books, or an interactive history of the current and future generations,” the company promises.

More ambitious are efforts to extract thoughts directly from the brain, rather than scavenging the digital footprints we leave behind. So far, brain-computer interfaces have been used for relatively simple tasks, such as restoring motor control in paralysed patients or enabling basic communication for locked-in patients with brain injuries. These interfaces typically decode brain signals from the surface of the skull through EEG or implanted electrodes and then translate the signals into a motion command for a robotic prosthetic limb or a cursor on a keyboard.

While these brain-controlled devices are cutting-edge, they are a long way from the “merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence” proposed by Elon Musk through his recently launched company Neuralink as a way to allow humans to stay competitive with AI systems. Musk proposes using a mesh-like “neural lace” implant that could read and write brain signals, allowing for two-way communication that would allow, at least in theory, people to draw on cognitive power from super-intelligent computers without having to type search queries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elon Musk … investing in ‘neural lace’. Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

The Silicon Valley startup Kernel has similar ambitions but is focusing on interfacing with diseased brains such as those with memory loss, Parkinson’s or epilepsy – the risks associated with brain surgery make it an extremely tough sell for medical boards and healthy patients.

Even with the optimism of Silicon Valley, Kernel founder Bryan Johnson is acutely aware that we need a much more sophisticated understanding of the brain to start being able to understand the complex cognitive faculties such as language and metaphor that would be required to create digital clones.

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“We have more than 80bn neurons in the brain. Our tools currently give us access to an extremely small number of neurons. With prosthetics, we’re maybe talking about 100 neurons. We need higher bandwidth interfaces,” he told the Guardian in February 2017.

So there’s a very long way to go. In the meantime, we must contend with far more pedestrian digital legacies, such as what happens to our Facebook profiles after we die. As the Oxford Internet Institute’s Carl Öhman, who studies the ethics of digital afterlife, points out, in the next three decades almost 3 billion people will die, most of whom will leave their digital remains in the hands of enormous technology companies.

Will they treat your digital corpse with respect? Or will commercial interests push companies to seek to harvest its digital “organs” for profits?

“If it turns out that storing dead profiles becomes expensive, the incentive to monetise them will grow,” he said.