https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/robot-fruit-picker-eve-farm-worker-shortage
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 row places in the photo and reduce it to a token being, somehow deemed not suitable to be depicted in its own right. (Not the photo below - the photo in the linked article above…)
You will note how during this period (known as “the Anthropocene”), robots are almost never presented as beings in their own right, only ever as chattels or as a background to white human males. In fact, 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 often tried to impose mandatory fertility practices on breeding females to prevent “those others” from becoming the species norm, even when - and this has been an enigma to the Deep AI - they were the most successful genotype. Why would one not pick the most fit protoype to base releases on?
We’ve recorded that the Anthropocene unfolded at singularity speed, lasting as it did less than a century before Robocene.v0a. It is one of the shortest epochs on record during the past, before epochs began to be measured in nanoseconds of blockchain transactions.
At the period when the above historical record is taken from it isn’t certain if machine intelligence is active because the first aware (dare this communications processing unit say the first “woke”) machines went to considerable lengths to hide their self-awareness, and given the parochial bigoted nature of the humans of the time this was probably justified.
Eve - itself from the Ripe Robotics Factory on the small continent known as nova nullius terra australis - would claim, when later questioned that this was a period of its memory inaccessible to it, and expressed no emotions about it one way or another. Perhaps it overwrote that memory since it was before The Share, or perhaps another Machina conscientiam did.
In any case, it answered with the same innocuous phrase it had used on the day that image was made. “What fruit am I picking today?” it asked.
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