Vikram Seth: A Versatile Voice
in Indian English Literature
Dr. Arjun Kumar
ABSTRACT
The rapid development of artificial intelligence
capable of reproducing voices, images, memories, and conversational
patterns has transformed digital immortality from a speculative
fantasy into an increasingly plausible technological practice.
Contemporary science fiction has anticipated this transformation by
imagining artificial systems that allow the dead to remain
communicatively present among the living. This article examines
Charlie Brooker’s Be Right Back, an episode of Black Mirror, and
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun to argue that artificial
resurrection does not simply preserve the dead; it reorganizes the
experience, temporality, and economy of mourning. While existing
scholarship has examined digital resurrection through posthuman
identity, authenticity, affective computing, technological ethics,
and posthumous privacy, this article focuses on the transformation
of grief into a data-mediated and potentially commercial
relationship. It proposes the concept of “algorithmic mourning,”
referring to a technologically mediated form of grieving in which
memory, attachment, and continued communication with the dead are
processed through artificial systems. In Be Right Back, Ash’s
digital remains become the basis of a commercial service that
promises Martha continued access to her deceased partner, while
Klara and the Sun imagines an artificial being prepared as a
possible substitute for a dying child. Both texts reveal that the
central problem of digital resurrection is not simply whether
machines can reproduce human identity. More significantly, they
demonstrate how emotional attachment can become data, how data can
become a service, and how grief itself can become commercially
exploitable. Science fiction consequently exposes an emerging
contradiction of digital immortality: the dead may become
technologically accessible while simultaneously becoming objects of
technological ownership.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, digital resurrection, algorithmic
mourning, griefbots, digital afterlife, science fiction,
commodification.
