The pride of a father

There are little rewards lurking in the most unexpected places, just waiting for you to give them a chance to manifest themselves. And that, in an onerous time such as the one we are living under this pandemic, can make you smile for a brief moment or lighten your mood for the rest of the day, improvements all of them very necessary in the rare occasion when they come by.

This morning, while driving the kids to school, I happened to connect the constant presence of our electronic devices with the concept of bionic implants that would truly make them always available, and I mentioned this to them, pointing out the problem that the working lifetime of these gadgets would entail. Even if it does not suffer damage, it is very unlikely that one of these devices will last 30, 40 or 50 years inside your body, so it will eventually need to be replaced, with the subsequent surgery, infections, etc. To this idea, Trevor replied that durability was precisely the reason why most concepts bionic implants these days aim at establishing a permanent (or very durable) but relatively low-tech interface where all the advance sensors and actuators would attach on a non-permanent basis, so that they can be easily replaced when needed or desired. This is for instance the case with prosthetic limbs, which connect to the body in a relatively simple way and can provide different functionality depending on what is attached on the other end. The wording is mine but it covers the ideas that he expressed, and receiving this kind of response from my 14-year old son really warmed my heart.

Photo: Jessie Hodge

Being a parent is a very odd situation because, contrary to most positions of responsibility, where you take the fall for the result but have, in exchange, a lot of agency in how things turn out, in the case of your kids there are remarkably few knobs that you can turn and buttons you can push, even if you are fully responsible (with your partner if there is one) of the upbringing of a person. This ability to influence the development of our children has been diminishing for decades and even generations, as the means of transport and the communication media give easier and faster access to witnessing the way other people live. When the background of our life was limited to one or two villages, the prospects of life were fairly subdued: one can aspire either to do well in their home towns or risk their lives in the lottery of traveling in search of riches (in many cases to perishing along the way or never coming back). Now with the repeated exposure to the ways and customs of people from all over the world the panoply of paths ahead is almost inexhaustible, so the chances that the children take after their parents become really slight, not only as a matter of preference, but also as a result of societal evolution, which might render the attitudes of the parents unsuitable for their children.

Under these circumstances, a parent can only hope that the kids manage to do well in their own way, providing, when needed, a helping hand, a shoulder to cry on or an educated opinion, but certainly not steering the minds and hearts of their offspring the way it used to be commonplace not so far ago. In this educational context, seen that my son was able to present a solid argumentation about the ideas he has is really reassuring. Besides, it is really satisfying that his interests are somewhat aligned with mine, even if this is just self-serving. It is clear that my taste is not better or worse than anybody else's, but sharing something with them gives us more opportunities to interact peacefully.

Luckily, the interaction described above was not the last one of the trip. To Trevor's comment on the prosthetic limbs I connected the question that Stanislaw Lem posed in "Are you there, Mr. Jones?": what happens when (or if), at some point in the future as the technology permits, someone replaces all their body parts with bionic ones, pretty much in the way of the ship of Theseus, to the point that it is not clear if the ensemble is still a person (and therefore can be sued) or just a machine (and therefore it can be owned). This time it was Jason the one who replied with the case of "The Bicentennial Man", the 1999 movie that they have seen in class just a few weeks ago. The main character in this film is a robotic servant that follows precisely the opposite path. From a purely robotic appearance and relatively simple algorithmic responses, it starts to develop first creativity, then it asks to get feelings and so forth until it becomes, in every visible way, like a person. The conflict arises when he starts to see the members of the family pass, the kids growing and having kids and grand kids of their own, and all the while he stays the same, but the situation eventually becomes too painful and it asks to be allowed to age and eventually die, just like all his loved ones do.

The extension of this post should be a good indicator of the richness of the emotions that I experienced in this very short drive. I have just realized that I have been writing for almost an hour to cover an episode that hardly lasted more than six or seven minutes, but anything less would not be doing it the justice that it deserves. Being a parent is a hard job, as my father always says, it is like signing not just a blank check but a whole checkbook. But when you have these moments of connection with your kids, all the sleepless nights and all the missed school reunions vanish from memory and all you can think is how happy you are about they way they are tuning up. And it is not, as I pointed out before, a matter of pride, because there is not that much that I could have an influence on. Instead, it is mostly their own doing, so they are the ones with the right to be proud of what they have become (or are becoming). I will just look from the side line in amusement. Have a nice evening.