The Genes of AI #01 — Ctrl-Z

July 7th, 2023

 

Wait, did he just kidnap their daughter?

Impressions:

This is what I was afraid of when I glanced through the source. It's an interesting philosophical topic in transhumanism, especially as it related to cloning, because that's essentially what the schtick was in this episode. She's sick, but we can create a backup of you. *You* will die, but your clone will live on. For everybody else, it's a continuation of *you*, but it is essentially a brand new person that could have been created at any point, and especially from *your* perspective, you're dead. Or even what's moral; to commit essentially suicide immediately and replace yourself with that clone, or to live out as much of your life as you can even while subjecting yourself and family to the process and pain of your gradual decline and death? And this doesn't really grapple with any of that. It just mostly goes "well, you'll forget the last few weeks, but be healthy again." And then everybody merrily goes on with their days, without confronting any of the thorny ideas or concepts at play here.

There's a meta discussion that could be spurred the idea here, but the presentation and understanding of it in the show itself is pretty lacking. Nor does it help that the characters and presentation are pretty dull too. Dude is a stoic bore. Animation and direction are passable to nonexistant, and the overarching story of the dude's mom being in jail isn't worked in well at all, nor does it seem particularly interesting. The nurse's excessively fetishistic short uniform probably didn't help matters too much either. I feel like I may have read too much Heinlein, Asmiov, etc in my youth for these superficial musings to work for me, though I also can't help but wonder if even Star Trek might be a deeper wading pool into transhumanism than this, even if the presentation didn't kind of suck.

Next Episode:

…

Posted in Genes of AI | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • gedata says:
    July 8, 2023 at 3:34 pm

    It’s like Plastic Memories but not utter shit so that’s a win in my books

  • LUNI_TUNZ says:
    July 9, 2023 at 9:17 pm

    I feel like this kind of missed the point of the topic at hand. I mean, they tell the mother they’ll replace her with her backup (from a week ago) she goes “nah, im cool,” lives for another week… then dies… THEN gets replaced with the now two week old copy they were already going to replace her with – and I guess in that two weeks she learned how to make eggs the way the daughter liked, so that’s what gets her upset.

    There’s an interesting story here, but I feel immediately reviving the mother sans egg cooking ability muddles it up.

    I feel like the story should have been “we replace you with the copy, or else you die, and if you die, the body is gone forever, and can’t be restored.”

    • LUNI_TUNZ says:
      July 9, 2023 at 9:25 pm

      My idea may have missed the point, too, but I feel like a few weeks is too short a time for such a drastic change. Now, maybe if the copy was from a year ago, like when you reset your computer and the last restore point was some random time and it undoes all the updates it’s had in those times.