8/26 Blink, Circuit-boards, There Will Come soft Rains, Other Reading

Blink:

Scavenged Circuitry:

There Will Come Soft Rains:

Bradbury's hauntingly poignant short story is very much the product the atomic age. Written a few short years after the end of WWII, it shows a futuristic world devastated by Nuclear war. 2026 must have seemed so terribly far away, 76 years in the future. Bradbury paints for us a fully automated world, with a JARVIS-like personal AI butler, a robotic fully-automated kitchen and roomba-like cleaner mice who all happily continue to perform their intended roles long after their fleshy creators are gone.

There is a certain amount of optimism in this picture, a technologically-advanced future society where every need is taken care of by a cheerful servitor class of robotic beings. It is a hopeful comment on the then-future possibilities of technology and innovation. Look! he seems to say, look at all the fantastic things that we might create! And this is wonderful, these shiny fascinating things that seemed so useful, so neat. And they would think, yes, this is a future that I would like, I would want to see all these wonderful things that technological progress has wrought.

And then the rug is pulled out underneath the reader and in their naivete they stumble. Because this future is empty, a shell of utility and glistening technology surrounding the empty space where the creators and consumers once were. And so this story becomes a warning, a cautionary tale of the double-edged sword of technological process. For the technology of the future has created wonderful things, useful things, but it has also served as the agent of their own destruction. 

This house, with its AI butler that cheerfully spouts the date and a reminds someone long dead of the birthday of another long dead person. The stove cooks food that will be eaten by no one. The mice clean a house used by no one. They are purposeless in this post-human world, but they continue to fulfill their function regardless,  the few remains of a civilization now of only ghosts. They are not the only ghosts in this city, the buildings are painted with silouettes of ash and negative space, the last moments of millions immortalized forever for a world just as empty as the house full of robots. 

And perhaps the house's destruction is not without purpose. Perhaps the AI went mad, made useless in a world without someone to serve, talking only to itself. There is a certain elegance to  the way it died, reading out loud the favorite poetry of a long-dead master as the building that houses its consciousness burns down around it. It brings to mind the Titanic, and the orchestra that played music as the ship sunk, consigning them to a watery grave. 

Exploring Arduino intro & Chapter 1:

The first chapter and intro were interesting, but there were a lot of technical words and descriptions that I will probably have to go back and look at once I have more experience. It did provide a good overview of the basic functions of all the different parts of the Arduino, which was both informative and useful.