อนุทิน 174145

African Risen

[In AUS, there are TV broadcast news programs from many countries like France 24, Thai PBS, … and Deutsche Welle (DW, Germany) with an “Afrimaxx” (above African countries) section. ScienceMag (USA) website has this Would life be better as a robot? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adn0643 as (a review of) good examples of development in 21C.]

“The Blue House” by Dilman Dila, the story of a robot, Cana-B70, searching alone for replacement parts amid a desert with temperatures ranging from very hot during the day to very cold at night. A catastrophe, the Great Burn, has transformed Earth’s environment into something more akin to that of Mars. As Cana-B70 malfunctions, her attention shifts from the time-consuming mechanics of survival to examining the contents of a hidden file, organic.sys. The file contains her childhood memories before being lovingly uploaded with her family into robot bodies. The majority of citizens has uploaded themselves, although some are too poor to become androids and others refuse because of religious objections. A few more resist in protest over using technology as a solution to a problem they believe was induced by technology. Just before Cana-B70 goes into an unrecoverable failure mode, she discovers a blue house similar to her childhood home that contains a beautiful oasis of vegetation growing from the fertile remains of human bodies. Perhaps those bodies are the recycled husks of her and her family or the deliberate sacrifice of those who refused uploading; regardless, their collective biological legacy will outlive the individual mechanical robot bodies that were promised to extend life. Transhumanism does not guarantee a meaningful existence, just a longer one. {credit text ScienceMag; story African Risen (2022) -book]