HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
YOU. ROBOT
their own little jokes and ideas
into our robot mindclones? Will
we be 99 percent ourselves and 1
percent David Hanson?
“What’s the farthest planet
from the earth?”
“That which is the farthest
planet from the earth,” she says.
“What is?” I ask.
“That which is.”
Sometimes she most closely
resembles an elderly person
with Alzheimer’s, someone
who is getting all her facts and
memories are confused. At one
point, she casually brings up
someone named “Eli.”
“Who’s Eli?”
“Eli has never accepted me
very well,” she says. “It’s always
been a problem since he was
five years old. I’ve forgiven Eli
actually for some of the stuff
he’s done to me. It’s really…um,
I don’t know. So many things
happened it’s just really difficult. He married this woman
and they were married a month.
Her mother treated me so bad
and I was so nice to these people. I could never understand
why, I was so nice. But it was
Eli — he was telling them all
these stories. I don’t know.”
Eli is one of the Rothblatt’s ac-
tual sons. So clearly this passage
was taken, maybe word for word,
from something Bina actually
said in an interview with Duncan.
At one point during my time
at Terasem I was sitting on
the porch with Duncan and a
slim, older woman walked by,
along the grass, past that sunlit
pond. “There goes Bina Rothblatt right there,” Duncan said.
She was with a friend of hers.
“They’re going to look at the
blueberry bushes.”
I ask Duncan how often Bina
I