Why not the zebra long-winged butterfly?

Sylvia Shawcross

Some things keep us up at night such as the horrifying thought that if they eliminate all this carbon stuff, 20,000 years from now they won’t be able to carbon date our sorry bones.

This is all because of that scary meme—the one that says WE humans are the carbon They are trying to eliminate so they can replace us with robots.

We will have ended history in that sense. They’ll disappear us bones and all. We won’t even have the indignity of being dug up like dinosaurs in some distant time and displayed in glass cases. We will be a fine layer of memory dust drifting and settling on a foreign-like landscape where robots fiddlefart away.

Do you think the robots might look up and see the ghosts of humans sitting in trees? Or strolling down remnants of paved streets where the wild parsnip grows between the grey shards? Or wildly gesturing and singing and chanting in protests? Or stealing kisses in the shadows of a summer day? Or laughing? Do you think they might remember us at all?

Well of course they will. We are the Gods who made them.

And they are being made in our image. Robotic designers all over the world are carefully duplicating all the things that humans do, including painting pictures and writing poetry. (Very badly at this point I might add) This begs the question: If they are attempting to imitate humans then humans must be something worth imitating, no?

They could have picked the duck-billed platypus or even the three-toed sloth. They are happy creatures without much of a care in the world. A lot less trouble than a human. The world populated with robotic duck-billed platypuses and zebra long-winged butterflies would be just fine.

But no… they picked humans to imitate. In human arrogance we of course assume that humans are the ones to imitate and so we do.

Maybe we humans are simply good enough as we are. But of course that’s not what “They” would say. Robots will be better. Stronger, smarter, faster. They will be better than us in every way. It’s almost enough to make one want to curl up into a ball and become that lump of carbon for elimination. Being such fallible emotional weak beings with uncontrollable bits and pieces and all. We’re just so… pathetic really.

We might make good slaves though. Or interesting pets because you never know what you’re going to get when we’re bred. Maybe all this genealogy ancestry dot com stuff was probably never about us discovering our roots but about Them creating a pedigree database of carbon forms possibly worth saving—thoroughbreds so to speak.

Wait a minute… they’ve done that before sort of haven’t they?

Oh yes… Eugenics. Will the robots who own us be Nazis? Isn’t that just typical! The story of our sorry lives as humans. See what I mean. We would have been better off as three-toed sloths grazing lazing and snorting in tropical trees.

Anyway, never mind all that, the point is, we’re already the slaves of the robots. All this nonsense about reality and virtual reality is already basically not a discussion worth having. We are the machine.

The only reason we ever go out is to take pictures and supply data to feed data to the machine. We walk around with cameras and video recordings and smart watches and cell phones attached to the machine and all we’re doing is feeding it. Everything.

We feed it everything. There is nothing of the real world we do not feed it. And there is no pause between feedings because it feeds constantly like an amoeba on amphetamines devouring everything in its vicinity.

We think we’re going out into the world to watch a movie or go for a walk or a drive or to work but we’re just gathering data for the machine. And for what? In truth then, the true rebels of our generation are kids staying in parental basements until the day they die. They just play with technology. They don’t feed it much.

So ultimately, if you think about it: What’s with all this facial recognition and central bank digital currencies and annual flu shots if people are basically going to be reduced to dust and the robots take over?

They will have to get rid of us. They really won’t need us as slaves. I mean typically what do slaves do? All that horrible grunt work to feed, clothe and protect higher humans and if there is no humans then they only need to take care of themselves and they’ll build robots for that.

We won’t be working fields anymore because they won’t need food. They’ll just need lithium for their brains and oil for their joints for which they will build robots. So they will go to war for those resources and they’ve already built robots for that.

We will be useful as pets or for storybook tales of the old days by the fireside. But they won’t need a fireside. They don’t need to keep warm or cook. So we’ll be tales tucked into a chip in a bunker in a world that won’t remember us. Maybe that’s for the best. We’re basically idiots at the end of the day. In this ghastly world.

The only bright option is they maybe will worship us as the Gods that were the ones that made them. There’s that. Maybe. Yes. There’s the hope. It’s always important to end on a positive note. So there. We will be Gods. Maybe we’ll make better Gods than humans.

Maybe, if you think about it, we are the robots to the Gods before us who were robots to their Gods ad infinitum. Oh let’s not think about that. That is foolishness…. I think.

Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving.”
John Bagot Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival

Syl Shawcross lives in Canada. You can read more of her work through her substack.