We are the Robots

Android Meme's Xenochrony by Bob Dobbs




Translation:

Dobbs: I say people are now largely patterns of information. So I like to use historical patterning to illustrate to friends how they became reduced or inflated to these patterns.

Marshall: We've been weaved?

Dobbs: Yes. We've been robots for five hundred years here in the West.

The first phase was psychological automatism. Its icon is Newton.

The second phase was biological automatism. The icon is Darwin.

The third was hardware automatism. Two icons - Edison and Ford.

The fourth was software automatism. Two icons - any President of the United States since World War Two and Walter Cronkite.

The fifth phase is a paradoxical condition. I call it autonomy automatism - the robot confident in declaring its independence and in refining its sense of freedom.

We have an endless supply of icons for this phase - any star in any demographic of any genre of entertainment or information. It's probably obvious to you we have not arrived at the sixth phase.

Everything has disappeared.

There is no present – only an ersatz present.

There is no longer a now. . . .