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

[ish mailian]

Took classes in childbirth and learned how to hold, feed, bathe, etc. a new
born, and yes, we were given dummies, and I took classes in CPR and AED,
and, we practiced with dummies. Though we learned the skills to preserve
and even save a life, we may have unlearned how fragile, vulnerable, dare I
say, sacred (?) life, human life especially, is. A doll is a dummy; it is
so much plastic and manufactured parts, engineering, bereft of the miracle
of nature's billions of years of unplanned generations. The toy, the dummy
or doll, the I-Pad has a built in obsolescence, and we know it, and we know
that a baby, a man choking on the floor, a woman suffering congestive heart
failure, is not a factory good, a complex machine like Man, but is only his
project, his compilation of junkyard parts, his Carl Barrington not his V..

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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