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

[ish mailian]

We know. Ironically, the use of dummies to simulate life saving, may retard
our natural life instinct and advance the death instinct. Like my chatting
here with you as I neglect my friends and family who are sitting right
here.

On Friday, August 28, 2015, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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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