is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

1. If the car you were buying for your teenager offered an option to continuously monitor the vehicle's status and location so that you could see where he was and how he was driving, would you? Would you agree to have such a feature on your own car? 

    gosh, continuous monitoring of vehicle use—what a radical idea. This sort of thing happens all the time, though not generally for public consumption. There's all sorts of government monitoring systems (e.g. for people under conditional release from incarceration), insurance applications (e.g. for people who agree to them to get reduced rates), and vehicle companies (ostensibly for "protection" of the vehicle occupants but, in practical reality, they're gathering data for usage and sales). 

    I would not agree to it, even for lower insurance rates or any other seemingly good result. Where I go, how I drive, and any other data that could be retrieved is my own business and not for sale.

2. If you lost your own purse or wallet, do you think there is much of a chance that someone would return it to you? 

    that would depend where it was misplaced, wouldn't it? If I left it in a busy bar or restaurant, I would not expect to get it back intact, if at all. If I left it at my local library's circulation desk, they'd probably deliver it to my house before I even got back there myself. 

    I don't often carry a purse anyway, and my purses are so small that I don't lug around much stuff when I do. Wallet, keys, lip balm. Most of the time, my phone is in my pocket rather than the purse. It's also an unusual enough situation that I am, if anything, hyper-aware of the purse itself and loath to set it down at all. 

3. If you won a housekeeping robot that could do every household task from picking up your clothes to shopping for food and cooking dinner, what would you still want to do yourself? 

    I would futz with my houseplants now and then, though I would for sure leave the task of repotting to the robot.

    I would cook or bake sometimes. Well, rarely. I do like to cook and might do it more often if it weren't a pain to clean up. My dishwasher is not worth the bother, so I hand-wash all my dishes. That cuts the motivation to cook in half, or less. 

    Everything else, the robot is welcome to, particularly windows and the bathtub.

4. Would it be murder to obliterate the memory of a conscious computer? What if it were fully backed up? 

    Computer consciousness is not the same as human (or animal) consciousness. Sentience is one of those rare concepts that I think is easy to understand but hard to define; we just know when something is alive, has consciousness, is sentient. 

    In my opinion, based entirely on feelings and the little that I know of the science, is that the "memory" of a computer does not equate in any way to the "mind" or "soul" of a person. Erasing or "obliterating" it is not murder. The concept that it can be "fully backed up" only reinforces that perception—there is no equivalent for animal consciousness.

5. If you were guaranteed honest responses to any three questions, whom would you question and what would you ask? 

    • I would ask a professional movie reviewer for their top 100 (or whatever seemed right) movies, ever. I would probably skew this question toward comedies, since that genre is the hardest for me to connect with.

    • I would ask the same of a contemporary director, e.g. Tarantino or Soderbergh. I would push this toward action or independent films, or maybe those with the best cinematography, since that's the sort of film I gravitate to the most.

    • I would ask my college roommate for her Butterfinger Torte recipe, which she's refused to give. (For what it's worth, the pictured and linked recipe is from the official Butterfinger site, but is nowhere near the version that she used to make.)

6. Do you strive more for security, accomplishment, success, love, power, or excitement? 

    of those, I strive most for security—but would argue that the word is harder to define than it is to achieve. It can cover everything from door locks to finances to personal relationships and beyond. I picked that one because I believe that accomplishment is fleeting, success is illusory, love is a murky pit filled with electric eels armed with throwing stars, power is all in your head, and excitement isn't necessarily a good thing. 

    The sort of security that I'd like: enough money coming in to have some set by for emergencies. Better door locks. Screens that perfectly fit the windows. Somebody I can trust to be there when I need them. Stairway handrails that won't fall off the wall. Motion-sensor lights that function properly (meaning, not turning on when a leaf blows by, and but sensitive enough to startle someone walking around in the dark). Strong insurance that will pay for a variety of health issues plus dental (because dental care is never, ever cheap, is getting more expensive every minute, and seems unending) and vision (because age brings increased need for maintaining good eye care). A vehicle that doesn't require a lot of maintenance (because I drive so little). 

    This list could go on for days. 

7. While running on an icy sidewalk in front of a neighbor's house, you slip and break your leg. Would you sue your neighbor if you stood to make a lot of money? 

    well, yeah, but not because it would be a money-maker. I would do it because that's the practical reality of personal injury in someone else's space, which could have been prevented or mitigated in some way by that property owner making an attempt to preclude it. My insurance wouldn't pay, and they would expect the owner to pay, and the owner would refuse (as would their insurance company)—and a lawsuit would make it happen.

    Anyway, I would hardly be in it to make a lot of money, just to recover from the injury and get back to normal.

 

[from The Book of Questions; the title quotation is by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from Half of a Yellow Sun]