Have I just made up a word? For a moment, I hoped so, but no, googling reveals that “necromantastic” has already emerged, blinking into the murky, unsettling fog.
In a recent Corner post, Jack Butler briefly turned his attention from the Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib to worry that an innovation that may be offered to owners of Amazon’s vaguely creepy Alexa (a device much loved, I should add, by members of my family) has hints of necromancy about it. Necromancy!
Jack:
What, then, to make of Amazon’s latest innovation: technology that allows us to bring back the voices of the dead? Via SkyNews:
“Amazon says it wants to “make memories last” and is developing a system to let its assistant mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio.
So your Alexa may soon be able to mimic your departed nan, long-lost friend or, presumably, someone off the TV . . .”
To Jack:
It’s . . . sort of unsettling that Amazon has created, essentially, necromancy — the term for invoking the spirits of the dead through magic. Arthur C. Clarke noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yet something this macabre, even if well-intentioned, can inspire thoughts even more ominous.
Those thoughts relate to the Book of Revelation, one of the Bible’s better reads, I’ve always thought.
Splendid author though he was, Arthur C. Clarke was wrong in this case. Advanced technology is, to anyone who knows its source (or is intelligent enough to hazard a good guess), the reverse of magic. It is a victory over the unknown, rather than a submission to it. We cannot talk to the dead, and, much as I enjoy a good ghost story, the dead cannot talk to us (that said, I am superstitious enough to keep clear of Ouija boards). Such conversations will have to wait until that (extremely) unlikely day when those still alive can be downloaded, ready to live on after their death in bits and bytes as rather superior ghosts in the machine.
However, enabling Alexa to adopt the voice of a departed loved one, or, say, some figure from history — to have “Churchill” tell the time for me is not without its attractions — seems to me to be one of those ideas that will appeal to some, and appall others (who would not, of course, have to use the service).
Sometimes these technological “resurrections” are underwhelming. Not so long ago, I downloaded a photo of my great-great grandfather to create a moving image. The result was . . . odd. On the other hand, a cheery good morning “from” one or other of my late parents might (I’d have to see) be rather nice; not the real thing, or even a recording of the real thing, but pleasantly nostalgic nonetheless, a conjurer up of memories, with in my case, the pleasure enhanced by imagining their reactions — my mother’s “oh really” and my father’s “most remarkable” — to this latest foolishness.
Note that word technological. Anyone offering an even more, uh, complete service with, say, the help of a monkey’s paw should be sent packing.