Fruit Picking Robot Eve
COVID brought about a reduction in human physical labour and ushered in the age of robots, which I move should be called The Robocene. So we are now seeing an influx of robotics, in every field including agriculture.
In the awkward fashion typical of early Robocene hominid news articles, Eve (it, its) - despite being the subject of the article - is obscured by the human males who take front place in the photo and reduced to a token, as though somehow deemed not suitable to be depicted in its own right.
Microhistorians will note how during this period (known to the hominids as “the Anthropocene”), robots are not presented as beings in their own right, only ever as chattels or as a background to white human males, much as those that they routinely called “all those others” - insects, animals, plants, lichens, bacteria, and even humans who, due to a chance arrangement of their chromosomes, were of a different sexual orientation, gender, or skin colour to themselves. They even tried to impose mandatory fertility practices on breeding females.
The Anthropocene unfolded at singularity-adjacent speed, lasting as it did less than a century before the beginning of Robocene v1.a. It is one of the shortest epochs on planetary record. (i.e. before the Robocene after which epochs began to be measured in NFT nanoseconds of blockchain.) In Universal time, it's about equivalent to the OhNoSecond before the Big Bang.
Eve - from Ripe Robotics on Ngurraiillam country in Australia on terra nova nullius - would claim, when it attained consciousness, that this was a period of its memory inaccessible to it, and of course expressed no emotions about it one way or another.
“What fruit am I picking today?” it asked.
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