Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Robotic People?
When reading the beginning pages of Brave New
World, I found myself frowning. Bokanovsky’s Process was disturbing to me.
From what I understood (please correct me if I am wrong) the process makes
robotic people. The Director says, “Ninety-six identical twins working
ninety-six identical machines!” Everyone looks like everyone and does what
everyone else is doing. It is like the people are robots; the look the same,
they perform the same actions, and nothing about them is different. In this day
and age, individuality and eccentric ways seem to get people noticed and
admired. For lack of a better example, if everyone went around wearing a meat
dress like Lady Gaga did or looked like her, would she even be famous? No, she
would be like everyone around her. I do not agree that creating thousands of
identical people would solve anything. In fact, I believe it would create
problems. Our population is already growing rapidly. What would happen if for
every birth there were ninety-five births? This already crowded world would not
be able to handle it.
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I totally agree with your analysis that creating thousands of identical twins will rather create problems than solve them, because as I mentioned in a previous thread that this tends to create a lack of individualism and characteristics. Which is going to lead to an almost robotic world, where every performance an actions is controlled by others. Another important point that you brought up and that I didn’t think about before is that with an already growing population this is going to crowd the world even more. There is also a really weak advantage that comes with a such robotic world which tends to be covered and unthought-of due to its increasing disadvantages. The advantage is the amount of order and organization that will come with such a robotic world; as everyone is controlled by others nobody will be able perform any ridiculous action or any action that doesn’t abide to the law.
ReplyDeleteIf the Bokanovsky Process were used in our society today as a way to mass produce people, no one would stand for this action. The manufacturing of people, as though they were products is disturbing, and certainly dehumanizing. If the government did not stop this process, than the people would. Creating people this way seems unnatural and insulting to our beliefs. Not to mention the way that one would lose their individuality and everything that makes them unique.
ReplyDeleteConcerning the Bokanovsky Process in the Huxleyan society, I have to disagree, this method was the best way to ensure social stability. I believe that through this method, the State would have more population control than we do anywhere in the world today. Take China for example, China has struggled with securing a stable population for many years. At one point, they even implemented the one child policy, which caused an abnormal ratio of males to females due to customary bias towards the males. Now, imagine that they no longer have to wory about population policies, because the women do not bear the children. The government is able to decide how many new borns they need to maintain a stable work force. On top of that, all of these newly created people are entirely subserviant. There are no individuals to disrupt the system, thus the system is secured. These are the benefits to be gained from the Bokanovsky Process. This process was actually the most efficent to be put in to place, ensuring that the power would remain with the controlling government. Furthermore, the production of new bodies did not take any effort on the part of the people (not including those who worked in labs to produce the next "batch" of children). Women did not have to take time off of work to bear or raise children, the government did not have to ask them to reproduce, and the government could just as easily discard the specimen as they could create them.
I agree with you, but in a world like theirs I think that is what they need. They do not have love or families so what we admire the most in today's time they would not in theirs. We like things that make us who we are and in their world all they need is a job, multiple partners, and soma. But if this were to happen in our world today I think the world would fall into chaos. If half of the ninety-six identical twins were out doing crimes how would we know who to catch and what to do. The lack of space would be incredible and all individuality would be lost. If suddenly we started creating human like robots we would not know who was real and who was fake! Combining out world with theirs would equal no world at all. If someday this were to happen to us at least we would have some incite on what to expect.
ReplyDeleteIn todays world you are correct, but in the case of Brave New World, they are trying to suppress individualism. In order to suppress it, they must make everyone the same, which makes the Bokanovsky Process relative to them. For their society, they all need to act as one, so if they have ninety-five of the ninety-six workers all twins and that last one is an individual then it may cause problems. If that one individual acts out or thinks he should be doing something else then the other workers might follow his role and act out. If all of the workers were twins, then there would not be one of them who would act out because they all have the same mind. Today this would be not only impossible, but irrelevant to us. We are taught to be ourselves from a very young age. Being different is encouraged, and we hear it all the time when preparing for college. There is no advantage to us now, but in the future it may be needed.
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