B. (because there's no v in Japanese)

[ish mailian]

I keep reading this, how the new tech soldiers today sit at computer
screens and drone citizens with no remorse or sense of the destruction
their weapons visit on citizens half way round the world, and I'm wondering
if there isn't something nostalgically, romantically tragic in theses
pronouncement about our new tech soldiers, as if there was ever a time when
war, and the soldiers who killed with whatever advantage they had, had a
conscience, a humanity, a moral or ethical high ground that these boys
sitting in computer bunkers far from the fray, somehow, lack? Surely they
are not cowards, as some, including those who would kill them with an IED,
characterize them, but they are not courageous either, for courage requires
a threat to one's life. They are not risking their lives, though they are,
often, or ostensibly, doing something that is traditionally counted as the
highest form of courage, defending their brothers whose lives are in the
balance.  Would we give a medal to such a soldier? Call her a hero, though
she has never stepped foot on the fields of battle? We do and we have. So
it goes....and so it has been since ancient times....there is nothing novel
in these new tech soldiers.

On Friday, August 28, 2015, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Last night I stayed at the "robot hotel" about an hour outside of
> Nagasaki. Staff are almost all automated.
>
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/japans-robot-hotel-a-dinosaur-at-reception-a-machine-for-room-service
>
> Got me thinking how the contention in V. about humanity using whatever
> is its current level of technology as a metaphor through which to
> understand itself is such a wonderful one. The uncanny valley crap is
> 1% of it. Anyone who says with a straight face that we're hardwired to
> freak out at the sign of something close to but just a little
> different to us should be invited into a discussion of race,
> disability, transgender, and so on.
>
> But the "robots" there were just automata, not AI, and not much more
> technically advanced than the automata of Europe and Japan 200+ years
> ago. They're objects of delight, the same way.
>
> On the plane to the airport, back in Melbourne, I was sitting opposite
> two Middle Eastern kids who were cradling a robot baby. I'd heard
> about these - automaton infants that cry etc to teach youngsters what
> it would mean if they got pregnant as teens. They were as embarrassed
> as all hell to have to be carrying this thing around in public. They
> obviously came from a refugee family, too, given our neighborhood.
>
> The robots V. warned us about are none of these but, to me, are more
> like the drone pilots that carry out missions in the Middle East.
> 12-hour shifts in a dull portable in the Nevada desert, disconnected
> from the acts they're carrying out on a muted screen, and forbidden
> from discussing any of this when they get back home each day. That's
> humanity driving itself into the deathkingdom.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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