This is a Hilton

Woke up in Shenzhen.  Had gone to bed there too, the night before.  Landed at their airport and searched for the name of this hotel I’d be staying at.  My morning Chinese reading has begun to modestly pay for itself for there, I had no difficulty discerning a “xi” and “er” and a “dun.”  Is that right?  I thought I knew all the SPG properties in Shenzhen.  I’d never heard of this Sheraton in Shekou. 

Arriving at yet another newly built Chinese five-star hotel lobby I was told they didn’t’ recognize my name.  Ah, well, someone else had booked it.  No worries.  "I am your lifetime platinum member", I added, so they’d be sure to acknowledge me.   “That’s nice,” She suggested   But we’re not SPG.  “This is a Hilton.”  My fledgling reading still has a long way to go.  The Sheraton is characterized in Chinese by a Xi Lai and a Deng.  

The next morning, I had calls, of course.  And so I rendezvoused with the large group of visiting Brazilian business people whom I’d come to meet.  No sooner had I arrived there with the group, that I was asked to speak.  There are no guidelines, per se.  “Speak about China.”  Speak about the last twenty-seven years of your life.  Well, then.   And I tried to share my favorite anecdotes, a comparison of Zheng He and Cortez.  A consideration of foreign ideologies, Buddhism, Christianity and Marxism and the way they had influenced Cathay. And just how does any of that explain Shenzhen and all that they saw before them.   And though I have addressed groups like this from Brazil, two or three times before, this time, I could speak to the fact that I would be making my maiden voyage to their country, next week. 

We visited UB Tech the robot company.  They are the highest valued AI start up anywhere in the world, I believe.  And we saw dancing robots that were cute, and smaller toy robots that would teach kids STEM education and the next stop was a vehicular robot, shaped like a small tank with treads and two video camera eyes, built to patrol the grounds of some location while a human, somewhere else could drive, and view and speak.  This robot had a feature that allowed it to generate a piercing noise that would drive away protestors, they claimed, but not hurt them.  It hadn’t occurred to anyone, it seemed that such a use case might be repugnant to people who hailed from places where freedom of assembly was guaranteed and peaceful protest, was not a crime. 

Robots are coming.  Robots are here. Lord knows what compromises this will mean for our lives.  Drones that can shoot me.  Robots that can repel me.  Dancing bots that can keep my, as yet unborn grandchildren company, while their parents do who-knows-what since any job I might imagine them doing will likely have been replaced by artificially intelligent creations of one form or another.  Sometime around this time we’ll probably be eligible to upload our cognizance and elect to live forever.  Will we even want to?

Tuesday 03/12/19