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

[Dave Monroe]

http://www.sleepdealer.com

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 10:50 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l