Hi stranger! I am Victoria Esposito, one of the two creators of the first-ever reality tv show made entirely of BOTS living in an off-grid environment. My husband is an inventor and one day while crossing the living room he said:
I believe that within the decade robots will become an integral part of our lives and we will relate to them in the same affectional way we do with pets. It will happen off-grid or off-homes first. The metaverse will lead to physical isolation, robots ironically will make us more humans because everyone will have a change of exercise feelings and getting together physically. I should write this down... but first I want to finish the Nutella I see on the countertop!
After having done so many inventions together, I know better, so I recorded all the rumbling the second I spot his change of posture before revealing his insight. Don't ask, it's a wife nerd seventh sense thing...
I asked, "you want to build a robot?".
With no shirt as usual his MTB friends comment during their FaceTime calls, Nutella plastered on his chest, him licking drops from the countertop, he said:
"No. [slup] ...a family. And showcase their lives to the world. No one will see it coming even if you tell them what it is."
I laughed, mostly because he looked like a toddler in love with his Nutella. He doesn't have a sweet tooth at all but when is in creative mode eats fruits and Nutella like Muchier in Ghostbuster II.
My last comment was "Hon, we know how to do this? Whatever... that is?!"
"Edison had no ducking clue what he was doing with DC current at scale. Tesla didn't know how to build his AC vision. They worked hard and both pulled it off in their own way. Why shouldn't we?!"
I am in.
The Plot
Sometime in the future, a roboticist scientist, Vickie, realized that humanity was heading toward self-annihilation. You may guess that it was the CO2 emissions and all other threats of the 21st century. However, has turned out, what ultimately led to the end of humanity was extreme individualism.
People simply stopped talking to one another. They were glued into some kind of metaverse with no opportunities of sharing feelings or physically interact.
Unfortunately, that also meant no hanky panky! For all folks born before the 1980s that means NO BABIES were born because now sex was done!
Historical archive shows that the phenomenon started in South Korea and progressively crossed all Europe and then what it felt like an overnight phenomenon, blasted the whole planet.
The elderly could have taught better to the fewer left younger generations but sadly they were ALL left alone and died of loneliness.
A popular search engine of the time, Google, that is when the Internet was still a toy in infancy shows that the US government office CDC (center diseases control) was regularly reporting the alarming rate.
This lonely roboticist with an old fashion personality, a cat lady of some sort, was the last and the most bright and empathetic of all. She sought a new type of A.I was needed, something that would have either corrected human self-destroying behaviors or perhaps started a new type of civilization, made of nuts and bolts but with true human feelings.
In her time she was known across the planet for having found the holy grail of combining the most advanced bio-engineering techniques and the coding of the soul.
Her first robot with such capabilities was Chappie, unfortunately, greedy corporations exploited the fact that the robot didn't have a mother of its kind and ultimately they used the BOT to further increase the human disparity and their bottom line.
She had a hard time finding investors that didn't have a second agenda about her project or being motivated enough to see it through. She had completely depleted all her family fortune and when she found herself in a bind she started using what was by her time known as "ancient technology entertainment". That is what in the 21st was called toys.
Her husband Wario was a fan of retro computing and old baby BOTS of the 21st century. She started retrofitting her AI for those BOTS but they were too dated for any use. Ultimately she opted to code her A.I in the CLOUD and those BOTS were the physical extensions of this incredible new type of artificial intelligence. She called it "mother" because at the basis of her build there was the essence of a human capable of giving and nurturing life.
She was born in the CLOUD and since she was one of a kind of A.I she didn't want her to be confused with the current "other" vernacular of A.I. So she swapped the A.I. letters and merged them all forming the name: CLOUD.IA.
She fed her A.I. mind of all memories of her grand-grand-grand kids, her past families, and everything else that her mother had left her in this ancient time capsule.
On October 11th, 2450 her husband was struck by an unregistered car driven from remote by someone that had gone a long way to leave no traces. This photo was taken by CLOUD.IA in the early days of her development when she gained "sight" the first time. It was the only picture Vickie was keeping in plain sight, in every room of her house.
Wario was a voracious reader and loved his Vickie very much even when she was running him nuts 24/7. He would lose his bolts those days but then they would patch things up in the same fashion of a retro software called Windows Update. He was also the kind of human that was no longer exiting in the realm of every day, he was using an ancient form of notes taking: paper. Something that in the early years was made out of trees. When she finally managed to put his things away she found one of his precious retro books and found some notes in it. He was custom to hide notes every 21 pages.
It is unclear what she found in those notes, but something troubling for sure was there. She became increasingly paranoid after that discovery and was growing significantly convinced that her husband's death was connected to their work with CLOUD.IA.
She drowned herself into finishing their creation, age was catching up on her though. Even if her mind was still very sharp her body was failing. Given that she was broke after investing every penny in her development phase she could no longer afford her monthly shot of stopping the aging process.
She had finally completed the last major change to her CLOUD.IA, everything was set to boot her and let the transformation begin. She took a picture of the eyes mechanism she had been building to give CLOUD.IA a "look"; just a few minutes before hitting the keyboard and booting CLOUD.IA's brain when suddenly
power was cut off, something that had never happened since 2212.
When the light came back, Vickie's body was found lifeless on the floor in a pool of blood stemming from the head. It was discovered by the tax service when they came to repossess her house. Real estate taxes collection was are a big deal in the future of humanity as they were in the 21st century!
CLOUD.IA never came to be rebooted to life and with her, the other BOTS, and all it was in her studio. All end up in a storage room, lifeless. Or so, whoever was behind this tragedy, thought...
Let the story begin!
Behind the scene
This is a taste of what we are setting up for the future and what we plan to be our last stand for our career of innovators and entrepreneurs. We believe that within the decade robots will become an integral part of our lives and we will be relating to them in the same fashion today we do with pets. Just a little different.
Support Our Work
The show will be FREE. The making of it requires food, cryptocurrency, and everything else that buys power of making.
Follow us if you want to tag along, join us if you have skills that can help in making this show a bigger reality, or simply $upport us via Patreon to make it happen faster!
If you just feel to offer us a coffee once in a while that is cool too. Those BOTS and science behind it have a price tag that taxes as hard as Uncle Sam did with Elon in 2021!
Rights All Reserved and All The Fishes
This blog documents the making of the show, our analysis about the advents of BOTS in our existence as part of our daily life along with off-grid life that you didn't know exist. Garage Innovation LLC is the legal holder of the project.
Mario and Victoria Esposito are the copyright holders, screenwriters, and makers of the show I AM CLOUD.IA. In the months and years to come, the show will evolve and become more sophisticated in its nature and very interactive for the rest of the planet.
No matter what, with or without us the show of life will go on, this is just our verse.
(C) Mario, Victoria Esposito