Awaiting the Singularity

I want to be incredibly meta. But that isn’t something that I can just do (or maybe I do it simply by doing it, yeah, never mind). I want to have some really cool thought about the singularity right now but I think that its something we have spent too much time discussing and thinking about already. Or maybe we haven’t. Here it comes… The future is always in motion (I refuse to say that in Yoda’s voice).

Anyway, with all of that out of the way, we return to a singleness of thought. Yeah, the singularity, that moment in time when technology becomes so advanced that we can’t tell the difference between life and machine. And I am working toward a point.

I recently read a couple Graphic Novels from Delcourt (I want to say a French publisher but these were translated into English). They have had some good stories in the past and the ones I have gotten to now are no exception. I’m talking about a couple of the books from the Androids line. The first being Resurrection (Delcourt 2016).

The basic storyline in this one is advancements in medical tech have gotten to a point where humans pretty much live forever. There is no disease or even aging. All we have to do is take a pill daily and we can go about our lives. The trade offs are, we can’t have kids and the ennui of living forever. Eternal life is a double edged sword when you have accomplished all you would ever accomplish and what not.

So here we go. I am going to jump in and give out some spoilers because this is an exploration more than a simple review. The twist of the storyline is these people that are living forever aren’t even human. They are androids. They are the caretakers of what is left of humans and they are searching for ways to bring back the human race. But not all of them know this.

The pill that they have been taking every day for millennia is little more than a placebo. The people are mind wiped and reprogrammed to think they are as human as any person born of the flesh.

And one of the characters is found to be pregnant. Which takes us back to the quest to rebuild man. The world is run by a church group that has been working for years, trying to find a viable progeny. The android that ends up pregnant is the only one to have worked over the years. Of course, they wipe the memories of all the failures so they can maintain the peace of their secrets.

The way it plays out is an interesting turn of the singularity. Instead of man becoming so entwined with machine we can’t tell the difference. Machine has become so entwined with man that it can no longer tell the difference. Aside from this being a good story on its own, it sets the stage for others in the series.

In Volume 2: Happy He Who Like Ulysses… (Delcourt 2017), we have a similar premise but it the story unfolds from an entirely different perspective. In this one Man has achieved the stars and a mission is exploring deep into space thousands of light years away from earth. At least until they run into some problems and need to return to earth.

Through the way the story unfolds we are again given a glimpse into how the machines built to serve Man develop a humanity all their own.

Like I mentioned. They are some great stories and worth checking out. Looking at how we are human through different perspectives can give us a better idea of who and what we are.

###

If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.