Dahlia-
Good handling of the gray areas classes. You took an even-handed approach, and the students have told me they appreciate that. It’s a topic that’s way too easy to get preachy about.
Good work
-- Anton
Another text:
We will be back in class this evening.
-- Ben
It is a terse announcement, but I feel a huge wave of relief. The news coming from South Sudan has been ugly all week. The new government has not brought any relief from the unrest that had cast the old government out. Apparently the new government represents only one of many competing interests, and in that part of the world, political competition still includes street violence, kidnappings, and death squads. For that matter, it still includes casting voodoo spells, according to some of the human interest reports.
In class, Ben and Janet tell us about their adventure.
Ben starts, “We were there with the Good Food For All NGO. They are working with farmers in the region, helping them get hooked up with more advanced agri-creations from the developed countries.
“It was helping a lot,” then he frowns, “but we found ourselves running afoul of some localist sentiment.’You can’t use these foreign ways here in South Sudan!’ said these ... localist enthusiasts, I shall call them.”
Janet continues, “It’s not the first time we’ve heard this complaint. But given all the other unsettling things happening there, this time it was a lot more threatening. Our local friends advised us that they were getting worried, too. This new government was not helping things. The new government agents that came to our area got people all excited about the new ways things were going to be done ... genuine South Sudan ways, they said, that would bring food and freedom to all. But they were sketchy on hard details.
“We didn’t have anything to fear from our neighbors, our friends assured us, but these outsiders were an unknown quantity, and they were feeding both the anger and the optimism the young men in our area were feeling. It was heady stuff ... and worrisome.”
Ben adds, “That part of Sudan still has a lot of young people. Because of the impoverished conditions there, the baby boom has never stopped. The social mix there is quite unlike anything you experience here in New York or in any other metro area. So many young people! So much raw enthusiasm! Such adventuresome spirit! That’s why we like it.”
Janet doesn’t look so happy when she says, “But a week ago three women who worked at our clinic were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night. We’re not sure where they are now, but the next morning we heard that they were accused of being witches.”
She looks at Ben, and there is pain in her look. “That afternoon we started our journey back.”
Ben gives her a little hug and concludes, “We are happy to report that went comparatively smoothly.”
“Comparatively,” adds Janet. “We did get arrested in the capital for being spies and had to spend a night in jail and pay a fine before we could leave the country. But that’s just a usual sort of shakedown that happens in that part of the world in times like these.”
“... Wow!” I think, and I can think of nothing to say.
Jaden pops up the first question, “Did I see on the news just before I came over that they were burning clinics? Calling them works of the foreign devils?”
“What!” I say to that, along with several others.
Ben looks grim when he answers, “Yes. I just received word that one of them was ours.” Janet looks at him sharply. I guess he hadn’t had a chance to tell her.
“Couldn’t the creations protect you? Why would they let this kind of violence happen?” Jaden continues.
“The creations there are South Sudanese creations ... at least in their imprinting. They are imprinted to support their people just as much as ours are imprinted to support Americans and their ideals. If the South Sudanese humans think we and our works are foreign devils, their creations will feel the same.”
There is a long silence before Annette asks, “What will you do now?”
Ben says, “Well ... that burning means it will be a while before we can go back. It’s getting pretty out of hand there. So ... we’ll have to do something else.” He gives Janet a quick kiss and a hug and looks at Miranda. “The baby-making moves to top of our schedule for now.” Janet brightens and so does Miranda.
Halfway through Ben and Janet’s adventure story, Jaina drags herself into class. It looks like she can hardly stay awake.
I could have let that pass as youthful excess, as I had in previous weeks, except that her online testing and homework assignments are both mediocre and late ... except when her cyber covers for her, and it isn’t hard to spot when that happens because her cyber is really sharp.
I press her a little after class proper starts, and she quickly starts whining. Yup, she is as tired as she looks. I back off, but when class ends, I ask her to stay for a minute. When the room empties, I open with, “What’s up, kiddo?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing describes your class, testing, and homework performance. You’re way behind. What’s up?”
She thinks a moment. “I guess I’ve been clubbing pretty heavy,” she admitted.
“Boyfriend?” I ask.
“No! ... not yet, anyway. It’s my girlfriends. We’ve been going on one of those new “world tour” virtuals. We signed up for ninety concerts in ninety cities in ninety days. And,” she says proudly, “we’ve been seeing how many post-concert parties we can crash. We’ve been pretty clever at that, and we’ve met a whole lot of really important people! ... And a lot of phonies like us, too.”
Inwardly I cringe. The world tour virtuals are the latest buzz. This year they are popular and heavily marketed. DeMuzzy has done product placements in several. “How far along are you?”
“We did number twenty two last night.” She brightens a little. “We saw Lui E./Lui I. in Shanghai. Wow! The effects they put up there are mind-blowing!”
Being Ms. Wet Blanket is not a favorite task of mine, but ... “You know your course work is suffering ...”
“It shouldn’t be. I’ve been taking the latest pills.”
“If you have, they aren’t working. Look at you now.”
First she just stares at me like I am being a total loon. I simply wait, and it isn’t long before she rubs her eyes a little.
“Yeah,” she says, “I think I’m going to have to change my prescription.”
“You’re enhanced,” I said. “A whole lot more than I was at your age. That part is neat! Compared to what I could do when I was your age, you’re Superwoman!
“But you still have limits. And just like all us older fogies had to do, and your kids and grandkids will have to do, you still need to learn to set priorities. Sadly, that hasn’t changed, and won’t change. You still have some learning and practicing to do.”
She thinks about it and nods, then says, “Anything else?”
“That’s all,” I say.
She turns and starts to walk out. Then she gets a bright idea, turns to me, and says, “Hmm ... maybe I can send my cyber to the concert part instead of me?”
She smiles at that, heads for the door, and within two steps, she is a phone zombie.
Inwardly I sigh, “Still some lesson learning to be accomplished there.” I hope it will happen soon, but I’m not making any bets.
Once you have a zygote, you get into the choices of where to develop it.
Historically, all zygotes spent up to nine months in the mother’s womb and were nourished by their mother’s placenta. Unlike producing the zygotes, there was only one way to develop them into fetuses, and even today the zygote developers we produce have to imitate that environment pretty closely. Providing more variation in the environment suitable for zygote development is something today’s scientists are spending a lot of effort on. As they succeed we have more choices in what features we can put into zygotes, which gives us more choices on what the mature human characteristics will be.
Artificial wombs fall into two categories: those inside animals and those that are completely synthetic.
Animal wombs have the advantage of responding quickly to both overt and subtle feedback signals that the zygote issues as it is developing. Some, the domestic animal ones, are also well known to human agri-infrastructure, so they are easy to accommodate. A cow uterus, for instance, can be used, and it’s both readily available and cheap. And just like different breeds of cattle are raised for beef and milking, womb cattle are yet another breed. Their wombs are developed to be more sensitive to human zygote signaling.
The most expensive of the exotics are chimp wombs. Chimp physiology is the closest to human physiology, but chimps are slow breeders and the adults are touchy and dangerous animals to deal with, so their wombs are quite pricey.
Synthetic wombs have the advantage of complete control over the incubating environment, and they are completely mass producible, so they are quite uniform. This makes them cheap for mass producing babies with uniform heritable characteristics -- clone babies -- and it makes them well suited for producing babies destined for exotic environments, such as living in high pressure environments deep under the sea, and low pressure, low gravity environments such as Moon, Mars, and space stations -- the MMS environment.
Their disadvantage is that they don’t feedback with the zygotes on subtle levels which means a lot more zygotes don’t develop well. But this is something they are getting better at with time.
How these translate into personal choices:
Once again, cost-benefit is key. But in this case, it may be the government that is paying most of the cost, so they decide the benefit.
If you’re going to be raising a commodity child -- one being raised to fill a specific need that naturally raised children are not going to fill -- then you are going to be raising a government-grown child and you will have little say over the incubation. You get the result, and you get paid to raise it.
If this is your child that you are paying for, then you get to make the choices ... within the legal constraints. There are some ways of incubating that are considered too hazardous to be good for the child or the community. One example of something in the gray area is the geishas we saw that video about.
Currently cow uterus is the most popular. It’s a technique that is well developed and well understood, and cheap.
Dahl, need a favor.
-- A
It is a text from Andy.
We are just friends now -- the pills had done their work weeks ago and I am long off them -- so I take his message with no pangs. I remember, but it feels like long-ago puppy love.
What’s up?
-- D
Meet for lunch?
-- A
With that comes a scheduling proposal to my planner. I accept and our planners work out with the restaurant schedulers to meet at Salucci’s, a nice but no-nonsense place. We both get there on time and do some catching up. Then comes the pitch.
“Dahl, I’m about to take a trip to central Borneo.”
“In person? In human person? Back-to-nature vacation?”
“No, work. Borneo has some of the last primitive tribes that are not part of the Neolithic Park system. An opportunity to do some development there has come up, and both the local authorities and the developing company want a careful assessment of the regional social system they are impacting. This development is going to bring change to these people, and they want to make sure the change is good.”
“Sounds fascinating, and a bit scary.”
“More than a bit!” Andy laughs. “Right now the infrastructure out there is too primitive to support avatars. That’s why I’m going in person. I’m going with a party of traders, assessors, and negotiators. And we’re all going in person.”
He grins as he says, “This means ‘lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ Plus disease and insects, and all sorts of real life natural unknowns. Plus these people routinely bash the heads of their local neighbors if they feel they’ve been crossed, and steal women if they’re just feeling frisky.”
“... You want to be going there?”
Andy grins, “And I want to go bearing gifts -- DeMuzzy fashion gifts to be exact.”
“... OK, ... strange, ... I’ll bite, tell me more.”
“These are near Stone Age people, and guess what they like best from us civilized outsiders?”
“That’s easy: Guns and firewater.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But according to the local trader, it’s T-Shirts.”
I laugh at that. “T-Shirts! You’re pulling my leg!”
He grins back, “So the world does have some surprises for m’lady.
“I’m serious. What they like are the gaudy ones, ones with colorful graphics. They have no idea what they mean, but they get real friendly and cooperative when they can get them.
“I want to bring these chiefs some that are really special: some DeMuzzy-designed T-Shirts,” and he is serious as he says this.
“... Some cheap ones. I’m on a budget.” Now he grins.
“Well, I admit, you have surprised me again, Andy.” I reach up to touch his cheek, “That’s one thing I’ve always liked about you.”
Then thinking about his assignment, “OK ... Sounds like you want something designed for kid-level delight. That shouldn’t be hard to work up. Do you want something popular themed, something we pay copyrights for?”
He thinks a bit. “These people do make journeys to the big city occasionally, so they are aware of popular entertainment themes. And there’s a lot of schlock knock-off and pirate stuff in those remote semi-civilized urban areas nearby. ... Here’s a thought: how about some public domain classics. Can you do some of those well?”
“Sure. Good idea. I think we can do some 1930s and 40s Fleischer and Lantz stuff -- some Betty Boop and Woody Woodpecker and the like. Or we can update some of those old velvet picture classics. You want just T-Shirts?”
“Hmm ... let me ask on that and get back to you. How long to get these produced?”
“Oh, I guess about a week for drawings and a week for production. What quantities?”
“I’m thinking five of each, 100 total.”
“OK quantity is not an issue. I’ll get you a quote when I get back to the office.”
“Sounds great.”
I smile at him, “Borneo. You certainly are full of surprises! Good luck.”
He smiles back, we get up and give each other a familiar kiss and hug, and he heads off. I stay to finish my lunch ... and enjoy the glow of our touch. Pills or no, he is still a really nice guy.
As I fly into Cleveland to visit Grandma Altair, I see some new, quite noticeable buildings-large domes-in the heart of the city down by the Cuyahoga River, the area known as “the Flats”. I check my PDA and find out they are, of all things, steel mills!
Steel mills! Yes, in the 1920s the Flats grew into a steel-making center of the world, but Cleveland’s steel mills had died a rusty death in the 1970s as 20th century America’s Steel Belt had transformed into the Rust Belt. Now they are back, but in a whole new way. This could be interesting.
As I am driving to Grandma’s, I schedule myself to take a tour before I go home. When I tell the family, all get interested, including Grandma.
“My Goodness!” she says, “I haven’t been downtown for ... ten years? The last time was to see that rock and roll museum when they inducted ... now I don’t even remember! ... I remember that was the last one, though. When they finished, they moved the whole kit and kaboodle out to New York City–said there wasn’t enough interest here.” She laughs, and she is happy to come see what has changed since then, so we make it a family outing.
There is lots of traffic as we make our way to the Flats, and the roads are in good shape, but there are few cars–cars meaning those things that carry humans in them. The traffic is almost all trucks with a few creation shuttles mixed in.
“How interesting,” Grandma says as we pull into the parking lot. “This is the Rock and Roll Museum building.” It is a beautiful location, right next to the lake with a wonderful view of both the lake and the Cleveland skyline.
The tour guide is a creation designed specifically for PR with humans, but different than the usual PR-creation type. Rather than an attractive human-style android look, it has a robot-looking exterior inspired by Robbie the Robot of 1950s movie fame -- to symbolize steel making, I guess -- but unlike that movie robot, the voice is quick and pleasant to listen to.
“This building is now the Visitor Center for the New Flats Steel Complex,” the PR bot explains. “Cleveland is still, geographically, one of the best locations in the nation for producing steel. This plan has been a long time in the making, and five years ago we negotiated with the last humans living near the Flats to help them relocate elsewhere. A few chose the suburbs of Cleveland; most chose one of the more major human metro areas. Whichever they chose, we helped them get very nice accommodations, and when they left, we began redeveloping the Flat’s steel-making potential.”
“There are no humans left in Cleveland?” says Grandma incredulously.
“Oh, there are still ten thousand left,” the bot assures my grandma, “but they are now all far from the Flats in places such as University Circle and Kamm’s Corners.”
“... Just ten thousand now,” Grandma says wistfully. “There were a hundred thousand when I married your grandfather, and half a million at its peak in the 1950s. It was the sixth largest city in the nation then, you know, just behind Detroit. How times have changed.”
“And changed for the better,” says the bot brightly. “As our construction finishes here, the Flats will produce five times the steel it did in its 20th century heyday, but this time with only a tenth of the pollution. We have come a long way.”
“You don’t need any people to make steel?” I ask.
“Not any more. The process is well understood, and the work is still difficult, dangerous and dirty, so it is now entirely automated and entirely in the hands of industrial creations. This is why the Flats is now so attractive once again. The geography has always been good, and now that we don’t have the cost disadvantage of supporting human peculiarities such as zoning laws and pensions, we can once again take advantage of this wonderful geography.”
“Why do you have domes this time?” I continue.
“That’s a good question, but it’s well covered in our VR tour. May I recommend that you all experience that? Then I’ll be happy to answer more questions.”
We take the tour, and we all learn a lot. It is impressively interactive. My tour is mostly pictures of things happening in the domes, and it is impressive to watch all the machines moving around and the red hot pots of pig iron and gleaming bands of steel coming out as finished product. Jeremy, my younger brother, who’s planning to go to MIT, gets a tour that covers the chemical processes in steel making. He sees lots of graphs and charts. Grandma’s tour focuses on nostalgia–it is a history of steel making on the Flats, with old black and white photos and lots about the old steel barons of last century. It takes an hour, and we all get interesting tours.
At the end, Jeremy and I have some questions. Since my tour didn’t address the question I had earlier, I ask, “So, why are the mills in domes this time?”
The bot answers smoothly, “Since people don’t have to be near the process, we don’t cool the environment around the furnaces as much. The domes are hellishly hot inside, and even warm to the touch on the outside. The domes protect the environment from the heat and toxic wastes that are produced along with the steel. Those wastes are then gathered and sequestered in the old salt mines under the city.”
“I remember hearing about those,” chirps up Grandma.
“They have been put to good use again, just like the Flats have,” chimes in the bot.
Jeremy says, “I notice that this modern process takes only a fifth as much coal as the 1930s processes, but just as much limestone. Why is that?”
Once again the bot answers smoothly, “Much of the coal used in the 1930s process was providing heat. We are now using alternative energy to do that.”
“You mean like windmills and solar power?”
The bot is a little slow answering this time, “... Alternative. We get our power from many sources.”
Jeremy presses, “Wind and solar these days are optimized for electrical generation. If you use electricity to heat the raw materials, you lose all that efficiency you were just telling us about.”
The bot is cornered, and knows it, and relents, “The alternate energy we use the most of is nuclear. Each of those domes contains a large nuclear reactor as part of its steel making process. This is how we keep both the energy and environmental costs down, and this is why they are dome-shaped.”
“This is why the Flats Revitalization has been so long planned, but only implemented two years ago. Now that there are no people living within two miles of the Flats, we have permission to employ nuclear power, and this is why our production costs are now globally competitive again.”
We are all stunned. I say, “So radiation is part of the toxic wastes that are sequestered under the city?”
“A vanishingly small part. The vast majority of what goes down there is carbon dioxide.”
There is no more to say, so we leave. But we are all very impressed with what the creations are doing -- some of us are amazed, and some are scared.