Okay so I want to talk about SAM's childhood.
Ake made the point that we learn resilience in childhood and SAM didn't have one. That she needed the context of experience to process the new things she was living through
And the message of the whole episode is that it is those small moments that make up a life, make it worth living, and provide the context to get us through the hard days.
And as much as I love that... I've got to wonder what SAM's childhood was like between the hugs and the sunflower-yellow dresses. Because those are not the moments that fix her.
The moments that build resilience are the lifetime of hurt and healing, rupture and repair that come from living in a real, complex, and challenging world. The scraped knees and the difficult friendships and the well earned consequences of understandable mistakes.
Raising her is not just happy moments basking in the holographic San Francisco sun. She needs other people (preferably but not necessarily other kids). She needs struggles that come from the fact that the world isn't always made for you.
But I'm not sure how she can ever have that in a simulated world that was literally made just for her.
The slightly better route would have been for Kasq to make a generation of photonic ambassadors to grow up with each other. Siblings, friends, family. That would have also taken a LOT of pressure off of her.
But maybe that's the lesson they learn about organics at the end of all of this: that more than anything, we need each other.
