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thescificollection-blog · 5 years

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“We Are Alive”

Science fiction works are often placed in a future so far off from our own they seem impossible. It is hard to imagine our world in such a distressing situation to bring on such situations as those seen in “1984” or so far into the future for “Planet of the Apes” to even be slightly fathomable. Science fiction has often dealt with images that are so grandiose we can easily separate it from our lives today. However the 2018 video game “Detroit: Become Human” focuses itself in the ever topical city of Detroit in 2038.

The not so far future does not look too far fetched on the surface. In one of the opening shots we see Detroit in a similar state that it is currently; there is a bustling city that is building more skyscrapers while the suburban areas look rundown and borderline inhabitable (Teaser). This is nothing extraordinary, except for the fact that in this Detroit is the center hub for Cyberlife- the company that distributes humanoid androids.

The creator of these androids says “the hardest thing was to design an object that we would want to welcome into our homes. We had to imagine a machine in our own image, that resembles us in every way. That moves, breathes, blinks like us.” with the only obvious difference between a human and an android being the glowing circle on their right temple (Kamski). This aesthetic choice makes truly believing the androids are just machines difficult, because they seem so human, and this idea is played with several times throughout the game.

The first glimpse we get at the affects of humanoid androids on how humans interact comes from a scene where you can watch a man on his morning jog. He is being followed by his android companion when he stops for a break, throwing his water bottle at the android and rudely demanding stats on his progress after which he resume his run and almost knocks over a woman with no sympathies. Because it is hard to distinguish the humans from the androids some people's reactions are to just treat them all with little to no respect at all. Yet some, because of their compassion towards humans treat the androids with respect. Which is seen through one of the playable characters early game play. Markus, a household nurse android, cares for an elderly man who treats Markus like a son. He is allowed to wander the house freely, occupy his free time how he sees fit, and is encouraged to think outside of his programming. Because of this, when circumstances lead to Markus’ deviation and subsequent android rebellion leader, it is easy to see why he believes androids should not be put into the position of slavery. By making the androids look, act, and feel human “the stakes of the question of who gets to be human very clear” (Cardenas).

“The concept of the human has historically been used to delineate who is less than human, who is disposable, who is killable. Black people, women, trans people, queers, witches, and indigenous people have all been defined as less than human at different times by different regimes of knowledge.” and it is no different in Detroit (Cardenas). These androids begin to deviate or, in other terms, become human when they are pushed to extremes. Several times we see them pushed to deviation in a situation where a human would retaliate to save themselves, and that is exactly what the androids are doing. For Markus it comes at a point where his owner’s son is threatening violence against Markus while the owner begins to have heart failure. We watch as he is taken out of the situation and brought to a wall in his code that states “do not fight back” a direct order from his owner. Markus’ outlined body, his coded soul, beats against this wall until it shatters allowing him to push the son away. The breaking of the code wall giving us the first glimpse of what it means for these androids to become human.

For the android Connor we see his development into a human a little differently. His programing is the newest and most developed, causing the choices you make to bring on little development compared to the other two. However his model, being a detective android that is supposed to aid cops in finding devient and dangerous androids, runs the risk of dying in several scenarios. The first one being in the first chapter you see him in; a hostage case where one of the outcomes is Connors death as he sacrifices himself by pushing both the violent android and himself off the roof of a building. His mission is complete and he is pleased by this, but a future chapter shows him shy away from the edge of another roof as he investigates a new deviant case. If, by some unfortunate circumstances, you end up making specific choices in another chapter Connor can witness, both physically and psychologically, the death of another android which gives you the chapter ending “Connor is traumatized” (Connor is Traumatized). This comes up again when you have a very deep conversation with Connor’s human partner Hank. Hank drunkenly toys with Connor, asking if he feels or thinks for himself, asking if he is alive. Hank pulls his gun on Connor and directly asks him “Are you afraid to die Connor?”. If the previously mentioned scenes take place an option of dialogue is Connor admitting he is afraid of the nothing that would come from his death, the nothing that would happen if his task was not completed (Connor is Afraid to Die). None of these thoughts or emotions are programmed, it would be pointless to do so, which means that every experience Connor has leads him to evolve into something. These choices make him human, others make him a machine, some even end with him being scraped as a defective model. As you play you are not just experiencing a story but witnessing the development of something much more than a simple machine.

Another instance we see where an android has essentially become human by having fear, desiring to “live”, and a human showing, essentially a fellow human made out of a machine, compassion comes from a clip that would eventually become the basis of “Detroit: Become Human”. In the clip an android, Kara, is being assembled. The technician is having her run diagnostic tests to check that everything is functional. She begins to question the technician about what will happen to her, a very humanesque thing to do that androids should not be able to do, and is saddened to hear that she is a piece of merchandise. To the technician’s horror she sadly comments that she thought she was alive, making the technician begin the dismantle process. Kara panics, begging and pleading with the technician as each one of her plates and appendages is removes- screaming out “I am scared! I want to live, I’m begging you.” which stops the technician. He allows her to be rebuilt, sending her out to be sold off because the thought of hurting a creature that can feel fear is quite difficult, machine or not (Kara).

This is quite interesting because one of the main arguments against the creation of artificial intelligence and androids today revolve around the idea of whether or not humans could function in a society where thoughts, feelings, and emotions are partially nonexistent. The idea of a human creating an artificial intelligence that feels, thinks, and acts freely is almost impossible because we still do not understand what makes us cable of that. Many chalk it up to be the idea that humans possess souls, an inanimate undetectable thing, that give us these abilities. This is another thing the game touches on with the clip of one of the androids, Chole, doing an interview with the news. She is the first android to ever pass the Turing test and when asked how she is able to do that her response is “I only exist because of the intelligence of the humans who designed me. And you know they have something I could never have. A Soul.” (Chloe). The idea that the only way for a creature or machine or existence to be worth anything at all is the need for a soul is quite ridiculous. To obtain and prove a creature has one is impossible and leaves out the possibilities of future advances and interactions. What really defines a human is their ability to feel. To feel love, fear, sorrow, anguish, desire, exeter is to be human; to be considered more than just merchandise or labor.

As you play through the game there are many examples of choices you can take that forces the androids to make decisions either based on rational behavior or irrational feelings. For Markus it is the choice between making humans see androids as equals via violence or peace. For Kara it is the choice between loving the little girl as a daughter or to serve as a slave. And for Connor it is the choice between sticking to his mission to hunt down deviant androids no matter the cost or fear the death that would come from a failed mission. The choices you make shape these characters, helps them choose their path, and develops them into either machines or humans.

To become a human is to feel emotions, a wide range of them too. To feel happiness and sorrow, excitement and dismay, fear and courage all these make us human. To have them, develop them, experience them is what defines our every moment. We allow our own children born out of flesh to curate them, why would it be so far fetched to permit those we bare out of machines the same?

Cárdenas, Micha. “The Android Goddess Declaration:” Bodies of Information, 2019.

Europe, PlayStation. “Detroit: Become Human | Kamski | PS4.” YouTube, 22 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HvS86ePaaA.

PlayStation. “Detroit: Become Human - Shorts: Chloe | PS4.” YouTube, 23 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL1ZOLo3s7s.

sceablog. “‘Kara’ by Quantic Dream.” YouTube, 7 Mar. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-pF56-ZYkY.

VGS. “Detroit: Become Human - Connor Is Afraid to Die.” YouTube, 28 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GonrVf_SJSE&t=13s.

VGS. “Detroit: Become Human - Connor Is Traumatized, After Seeing Jericho.” YouTube, 29 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrJcLpo5d5A.

#final essay #essay

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grantplant · 7 years

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Eff a Rabbit

When is the best time to wean? At one year old, when baby is already going through extreme separation anxiety, sleep regression, and the massive growth spurt that will result in walking and saying her first words.

When is the best time for baby’s day care to close for their annual summer holiday? When baby is weaning, and mama’s hormonal exhaustion and emotional ambivalence about weaning is compounded by the two-week gauntlet of baby’s developmentally appropriate refusal to nap and need to be attached to mama at all times, in all places.

When is the best time for feeding the day care rabbits? During the day care’s summer break, naturally, when the weather is alternately scorching or storming; when you’re 6 feet tall and can’t fit into the hutch where their food and hay is kept; when your one year old is not quite walking and won’t let you out of her sight, even as you’re trying to squeeze into a rabbit hutch in 90-degree-heat; when the day care garden that is also entrusted to your decidedly black thumbs is alternately flooded and parched; when your Swiss German is not at all equal to the task of Swiss German rabbit maintenance; when the day care email is set to auto-reply and you have no means of consulting the other parents.

This has been our two weeks, and it has been hard. Hot, fraught, and with more than enough self-doubt and sweat for any one fortnight. We took a much-needed intermission last weekend and went to Turin, Italy, where we continued to sweat profusely, but did so with the aid of exquisite wine and pasta.

My short but stressful tenure as rabbit-and-vegetable-patch caretaker started when we returned from our also-short but obligations-free holiday. I recognize that my concerns surrounding the watering of plants and animals that are not my own may sound a little silly and make my world seem very small, but nailing this assignment meant a great deal to me.

Allow me to explain:

I stick out at Mira’s daycare. Pat and I are the only American parents, the only non-proficient speakers of any one of Switzerland’s four (four!) national languages, and—in my case alone–I react to the anxiety of being conspicuous and inadequate by sweating profusely. (Pat came with me on cupcake delivery day and can attest to the excessive perspiration. It sucks, and has the effect of making me even more stressed and self-conscious, which makes me sweat even harder.) I also happen to be one of the few (the only?) parents not dropping my kid off on the way to a workplace, and thus I don’t usually show up in workplace attire. Sometimes I am so fed up with looking like a hayseed that I’ll get up early and dress nicely and do my hair and makeup, so at least there is the illusion that I have somewhere important and respectable to be. But usually I am dressed like I’ll be sitting at my computer for the rest of the day, writing about how dumb I feel in my stay-at-home attire.

All of this is to say, projecting competence and confidence felt–and still feels– important to me when it comes to my standing within the day care ecosystem.

It appears that when the director asked for volunteers to feed the rabbits, she assumed that if you can rear a tiny human, you can probably manage two average-sized rabbits. I find this not to be the case, but I’ll be damned if I was going to let the staff and other parents smell my fear. I hadn’t fed a rabbit in fifteen or sixteen years and, seeing as I can hardly keep track of what I fed myself a day ago, I couldn’t remember what I fed that rabbit a decade and a half in the past. I asked the internet How to Feed A Rabbit, but, to my great consternation, the results directly contradicted Google’s translation of the laminated food list affixed to the rabbit hutch. That is, what I was able to commit to memory before my phone died.

After a false start in which I fed the rabbits only one time per day, I had a revelatory conversation with a fellow day care mom that set me to rights. The Monday that we’d returned from Italy was Swiss National Day. Stores were closed in observance of the holiday and our fridge was bare, so I’d taken inspiration from Peter Cottontail and nipped into the day care garden for some salad fixings. Even though the director had said we were welcome to take what we want (or… I think that’s what she said) I still felt like I’d been busted when I came to do my harvesting and saw that there was someone there with the rabbits. Embarrassment back-burnered, I took the opportunity to interrogate her on the finer points of “Hasen füttern,” and learned that (to the best of my understanding) the Hasen must be fed twice a day, morning and evening, with maximal hay, minimal pellets, fresh water, and an assortment of fruits and vegetables with an emphasis on leafy greens.

I hadn’t even realized there was a pellet bowl! Good to know. When my shift came around on Tuesday morning, I was dismayed to find the plastic container of pellets was empty, spawning fresh anxiety over whether I should buy more and, if so, which pellets are the right pellets? As it turns out, the grocery store offers one option—the kind with the rabbits on the bag–so I couldn’t agonize over which brand to buy.

All of this brought me back to the panic I felt near-constantly while running the pet sitting business after college. For more clothes-rending detail, read the book, but this scenario—minimal/obscure/outrageous instruction on how to keep delicate, unfamiliar, beloved, killable things alive—was just classic. The not-in-my-native-language aspect of the instructions is a first for me, though.

I don’t know if “F@#! a rabbit” is a common phrase or just something my mom says. (My tentative Google search on this subject was not very helpful, and mostly just shocking, but suggests this is a mom-ism…) Nevertheless, this phrase came to mind a lot during my stint as gamekeeper of Chinderhuus Öpfelbaum. When smacking my head repeatedly on the beams of the hutch, or spilling the newly refreshed bowl of water all over myself when climbing through the child-sized door. When debating how much was too much pellet, and how much was enough hay. When trying to “cut” a cucumber from the garden into pieces with a sharp rock, and cutting myself instead. When pushing Mira back and forth in her stroller between the spigot and the sprinkler itself to gauge the distribution of water over the garden without soaking us both. When reading in WikiHow that collard greens and beet tops were A-OK, while corn hulls were potentially life-threatening, while my attempted translation of the posted instructions on the hutch indicated these greens were verboten, but corn cobs were a great treat if given very occasionally.

“Feed” for me truly became a four-letter word.

You probably aren’t surprised to learn that nothing died on my watch. The garden got a little parched, it’s true. One my last day of service, somebody else must have come along at some point between the morning and evening visit and turned on the sprinkler, which confirmed for me that I do indeed have two black thumbs (and that it would take hours–days, even—to fill a water bowl from sprinkler output alone. Don’t try. You’ll look like an ass, and get very wet, chasing those droplets back and forth). The rabbits survived my ineptitude and, dare I say, didn’t have too bad a time of it. If anything, they were over-served and under-exercised, which is an apt reflection of the person feeding them.

As much as I’d like to say that I am done with the volunteer rabbit maintenance, I’d already signed up to feed them again a week from Saturday. I see this as an opportunity for improvement, though. Who said, “Success is 90% preparation, 10% perspiration”? I might invert those quantities, but in the spirit of the adage, I have already laid out in my head the order in which I will tend to the bunnies such that they are well-exercised, consume their hay before anything else, and get the appropriate serving size and variety of fruit and veg and mixture of grass and greens. I have a measuring cup and knife for cutting and portioning, and a pre-filled water bottle, negating any need to fuss with the faucet. My phone will be charged. This time, I will be ready. This time, I will get it right.

In a sort of epilogue to my time minding the rabbits, we had a new babysitter stay with Mira this past Sunday night. I found her (the babysitter) on a website called Babysitting 24. She has first aid training, worked as an au pair for two families, and speaks four languages (of which English, thankfully, is one). Of all the people that expressed interest in staying with Mira, she seemed like the most qualified. Still, whoever seems qualified enough? When she came, I was nervous and sweaty and talking too fast. Conscious of her need for time to absorb all the instructions and details I was throwing at her, I tried to slow down and be clear. While *I* know Mira is an easy baby and doesn’t require much, this woman had never met us, or Mira, or been to our home, so everything that was coming out of my mouth was 100% new to her. And, I realized, I was saying it all in her non-native language. “I’ll write it down,” I assured her, and I knew as I said it that 1) it all should have been written down in advance (rookie mistake) and 2) no matter how detailed the list I left for her, it would still be written in English.

Giving the sitter such cursory instructions in not-her-native-language put me right back at the rabbit hutch, Google translating and cursing that responsibility, fearing I’d do some damage to a little life that had great value to someone. Many someones. Except in this scenario, Mira was the rabbits and the babysitter was me.

Pat and I were nervous as cats when we finally left for dinner. My empathy for the sitter was in overdrive, and my mom hormones were screaming to go back home and call the whole thing off. But we didn’t. We stayed on the train, and acknowledged that this is hard–to trust, to let go, to find anyone in the wide world we are calm (confident?!) about leaving her with. We had a lovely dinner, and got home a half-hour earlier than anticipated to a sleeping baby and a good, incident-free report.

Still, when drafting the Guide to Mira for future sitters, I’ll channel my inner rabbit-rookie and think about what anyone would need to know from a first-timer—and foreign-language—perspective. With careful planning and luck on our side, Mira, the rabbits, that garden, and my heart, will be amply provided for, with only a modicum of stress, sweat, or four-letter words.

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