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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Virtual Childrearing | ||
| Learn childcare the virtual way; maybe long distance childcare, too. |
Did you ever have the feeling that game design was in too few hands? Consider this possibility.
In this passage, Gaia and her friends are sharing a virtual reality space from widely separated locations. The narrator, her husband, is watching her in the real world, in their needle-gym.
| Naturally, I couldn't see or hear Gaia's companions --presumably other women
gatherers in the same simulated tribe she had been visiting since years before
we met. She stopped again, listening, then turned around. "It's your baby,
Flower. That's okay, I'll take care of him." She laughed. "I need the practice."
I watched her gently pick up an invisible child. Her body suit tugged and contracted, mimicking a wriggly weight in her arms. Awkwardly, Gala cooed at an infant who dwelled only in a world of software, and her mind. I crept away to take a shower, at once ashamed of spying and glad that I had. |
| Technovelgy from Natulife,
by David Brin. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1994 Additional resources -
|
In reading this, it's clear that Gaia can get practice in caring for this baby in a virtual environment. But is this virtual baby the avatar of a real child, whose virtual reality suit is now feeding back Gaia's care to him or her?
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
