Open the pod bay diaper HAL.
It reminded me of the kid from that Twilight Zone Episode where he would wish them to the corn field.
Like that monkey study where it preferred the fuzzy surrogate vs the metal one that had food.
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I’m not suggesting that this wouldn’t be dystopic, but at the same time, I can see how a future version of our species might see everyone being raised up to a certain age in some kind of “nurture pod” as something good, a way of giving people more equal footing, and accelerating the development process to help compensate for our rather short lifespans relative to the amount of time it takes to do anything important. An argument could be made to suggest that this is a more equitable way of running a society–by giving everyone a consistent early childhood development, it could improve the life outcomes of everyone across the board.
Right now the idea seems pretty revolting to us, but a couple hundred years ago a father was expected to feel compelled to kill his daughter if she had premarital sex. People from that time period might find our current sexual behaviors revolting, but we’d pretty generally agree that they were wrong, so who is to say that we wouldn’t feel similarly about our present system for rearing children at some point in our hopefully enlightened future?
I’m not saying that it’s a certainty, but it would fit the established pattern of human behavior…
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Why keep bashing the desire to make our life easier?
I don’t like the unimaginative association of technology with neglect and abuse of this exhibit, which is in the same vein as the hackneyed screed against exposure of children to screen time. People are saying this is dystopic, but the fact remains that parenting is a really tough and shitty job with lots of liabilities and little rewards. We do it because we love and care for the kids, not because we like to be stressed out and tired and lacking sleep.
We should be imagining bettering kid’s lives with tech than suggesting us to be held hostage of “good old days”, which is a total BS. It really rubs me the wrong way.
1979:
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I came for the Skinner box reference, and was not disappointed.
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Dang, you beat me to it! I love that album.
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