Becoming Artificial by Sonik Danial;Colarossi Alessandro; & Alessandro Colarossi

Author:Sonik, Danial;Colarossi, Alessandro; & Alessandro Colarossi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Artificial intelligence, AI, AGI, technology, philosophy, machine learning, humanity, consciousness, computers, singularity, morality, society, future studies, embodiment, computer modelling, vitalism, war, drone warfare, autonomous warfare, sentience, mind uploading, data transfer
ISBN: 6474431
Publisher: Imprint Academic
Published: 2020-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Seeking Succor in Sentience

Oh, is that you? I’ve been waiting. Apologies, I wasn’t ignoring you. It’s just that it’s been so long since I saw anyone. I don’t mean the robot, I mean a real person, a human who blinks. They can make the robots do so much but I guess blinking was just too much. Or maybe they thought an old man like me couldn’t, wouldn’t notice. But I do.

It’s been the sunset of my life for twenty years now. The problem is that even though this is one hell of a long sunset, the rest of the world for whom it is not the sunset has not frozen. It’s not a postcard or snapshot in place. Sunrise, sunset, new technology, obsolescence of new technology, nostalgia for the old, reaction against nostalgia for the old, starry nights, polluted nights, round and round it goes with the hours and days and weeks and months piling up like the newspapers my grandfather used to get.

Now, newspapers. That’s one you don’t hear about anymore. I only know what they are because when I was very little I spent a summer at my grandfather’s house, helping my mother clean it out after he died. Like Proust’s madeleines, the smell of newspaper print will always make me think of this time that the very beginning of my life touched. It was a sensory time where things just were, and I knew because I could see or touch or taste or smell or hear it. Well, joke’s on both of us, because nobody’s smelled newspaper print in a century and I can barely see or hear anymore as it is.

This is where you’d want me to stop and apologize for rambling on, the way an old man is socially obligated to apologize for himself; be quiet now and step aside for the youth. But I won’t. I’m still here, watching this nigh-on eternal sunset, and you should watch with me a moment.

Oh, I know you mean well, with your briefcase-shaped tablet full of the innumerable studies of the effects of loneliness on the elderly. You think I don’t know? Son, that was my life. You probably weren’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye back in 2020 when the Corona, king of viruses, struck. Mom and I went to stay with her mother-in-law when my dad got called up to enforce the martial law. Thought we would just hunker down with grandma for a few weeks, a month, max. Mom thought that she could take care of grandma if she got the corona, since it was supposed to hit the elderly.

Little did mom know that the virus would mutate. Grandma’s week of flu-like sniffles were nothing compared to what my mom came down with a few weeks later. By then the hospitals were totally full and turning people away. Grandma and I watched mom die. In the hours between the respiratory distress and the cardiac infection that COVID-19 would turn to for the death blow, mom told me: “Watch over your grandma, honey.

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