Vivy: a Robot Ode to Life Vividly Lived

Science fiction boasts a rich history of making audiences ponder how different people’s lives would be in a future of new technologies. The more profound sci-fi stories don’t only imagine how cool or even convenient it would be if certain technologies existed; they also speculate on how these technologies could shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Take robot artificial intelligence (AI), which, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll be referring to as just robots. Wouldn’t it be super convenient if robots did more of our work for us? Couldn’t it be dangerous to rely too heavily on robots? Questions such as these, which concern the role of robots in humanity’s future, are a staple of the sci-fi genre. The answers arrived at vary: some stories paint post-labor and post-scarcity worlds built around robots; others warn about robots not only replacing our work, but humans…