Browsing the depths of CNN’s homepage late one night looking for some good content to write about, I found an interesting bit tucked away amongst the usual slosh of politics and celebrity gossip. Propped up at the top of CNN’s tech section was a story about texting…from beyond the grave.

Intrigued, I looked into the article and what I found was something between spooky and surreal. You can read the full article here, but the short version is that a man died, and his best friend, Eugenia Kuyda, decided to do something very experimental with the specter that he had left behind…that is, the specter of social media.

Compiling a wide swath of her friend’s social media accounts and personal text messages, Kuyda was able to create something rather Frankenstein-esque in my estimation: a bot that has taken on the personality, hopes, fears, dreams, and essential being of who Kuyda’s friend was.

Sounds like science-fiction, right? It’s not.

As the article says, the bot isn’t perfect. Sometimes it gets the individual’s personality wrong. An out of place response. An inside joke that only a few people would know. But the thing is close enough to “capture one’s ethos” as the reasoning goes.

Now, I have no way of knowing whether or not these two instances are interrelated in any way, shape, or form, but Kuyda’s work is eerily similar, if not identical, to the plot of an episode from the British TV show Black Mirror. In “Be Right Back”, a woman’s husband dies unexpectedly and after discovering she’s pregnant she decides to employ a service that recreates her husband as a bot based on his social media profile. A bot with whom she can interact.

Now, the conclusion of “Be Right Back” (in which a neutered, android version of the woman’s husband is kept in the attic as an expensive and elaborate toy for her daughter) is certainly more harrowing than the fate of Ms. Kuyda’s bot (which apparently remains in the beta stage). But the parallels between fact and fiction are shocking and the moral implications impactful.

I remember a time not too long ago in which the mother of an acquaintance of mine from high school died. She was young and it was unexpected. To this day, I still don’t know who exactly this woman was or how she died, but I do recall scrolling through her Facebook feed in a sort of melancholy curiosity. To me, that event alone was unsettling.

Seeing and reading posts that she had made mere hours before she died was, to put it bluntly, creepy. To see someone so full of life, expectations, happiness, the works, suddenly wrenched away was bad enough. To know that that Facebook page was going to be there forever (or at least for a long time until someone decided to deactivate it) as a sort of digital memorial, was downright unnerving.

Now imagine if that woman’s Facebook page continued to be active? If even in death she continued to post, react, respond? Some have said it would provide a sense of closure for grieving loved ones. Inevitably for some, such a thing would likely be a nice way to grieve. One more chance to say goodbye or even to just put a face to all those tumultuous feelings.

But for others, a bot like the one Black Mirror hypothesized and Ms. Kuyda fashioned would be more of a burden than a blessing. A machine so able to replicate one’s personal being would walk like a ghost through the newsfeeds of friends and family. A constant reminder of what was and what will never be again.

As we sit here at the dawn of the Information Age, the Internet continues to shape what we know about the world and about ourselves. From how we live to how we die, the Internet is becoming increasingly ingrained in culture as a phenomenon that is radically altering how we exist as human beings. Inevitably, some of those alterations are for the good. Skype allows for family members to communicate over long distances. Online databases allow for research to happen at lightning-fast speeds. Job sites have connected more employers and employees than ever before.

But for every benefit the Internet and technology brings to our lives, there are detriments as well.

I won’t preach to you, but Ms. Kuyda’s experiment begs the question: who are we to play God? If a human being can be reduced to a couple of tweets and texts and then reconstructed in a fully functioning, digital version of what they once were, what are humans in flesh and blood? Are we no more than our digital footprint? Or is there something more? Something intangible that can only be lighted on in a few, distinct situations that makes us definitively “human”?

There is no telling where the Internet, social media, and the like will lead us 50 years from now. 50 years ago, computers themselves were but a pipe dream. Now there’s one in just about every home in the Western world. Often more than one. And while this co-evolution and integration with technology will inevitably shape who and what we are in the years to come, we must also ensure that it does not rob us of that distinct thing that makes us human in the first place.

Whatever that thing might be.