Final

Episode 3

 

Russian culture has a long and rich cultural history, steeped in literature, ballet, painting, and classical music. While outsiders may see the country as drab, Russia has a very visual cultural past, from its colorful folk costumes to its ornate religious symbols. In the show Better than us they do not actually show the whole Russian culture. They paint it more like a normal western European culture. they do not go in deep about the actual traditional customs. Kids go to school, usually two parents at home with stable jobs, the clothing is the same as here in the united states. The culture that they show in Better than us is pretty similar or almost the same as the one in the United States, maybe the only difference is that the kids do not have a school bus. It is usually their parents the ones who drop them off at school and pick them up after they are done.

Today's technology is behind in comparison to the one shown in the show. The main technology that is shown in the show is robots. Robots nowadays are programmed to only do one task at a time and do it effectively. In the show, we have robots that can do pretty much anything that a human can do as long as a human gives them the instructions clear. For example, we see multiple times in the show how an owner of a robot can ask the robot to do a simple task, just like make hot chocolate, or do a more complicated one like going to the pharmacy to get medicine. They are programmed to follow orders given by their user, as soon as the order is completed they return to the owner and ask for another order until the owner is done with them or their battery runs out.

People are used to robots in this world. They are not against them, they just work with them. They have shown so far just a small group of people that is against them. They don't believe that robots are any good for society, they believe that robots are slowly taking over the world. They are scared that the robots will take over everything and just a small portion of the society will actually be able to survive in this world. Big companies do not sell it like that or just don't have that point of view at all, for them the robots are just a way for people to have a faster retirement so a robot can take their place on their job. It was explained that in the show's world the life expectancy is 70 years old and people usually retire at 65, so it would not make sense to only have 5 years to be completely free. They value the option of having people getting retired at 40 so they can have at least 30 years of freedom and their replacement would just be a robot. This is the main idea behind the big companies to keep the robots in the market.

The history planted is completely fiction since we have not got to that level of technology yet, but it can also be considered a part of a world full of innovation. The technology that they show is nothing too crazy, in fact; it just a better version of the technology we have nowadays. For example, we have the AirPods nowadays, in the show they have something similar that they used for voice assistance, but it is only a tiny piece of metal that they plug in their ear, and a voice assistant pops up to talk to you fluently. Another example could be the smartwatch, in the show they have something very similar, but it is more like a bracelet that displays a hologram on your wrist, but it still has the same functions as the normal smartwatch that we know nowadays. You can see the time, call, check the weather, etc. 

The world planted is definitely looks like a fictional world right now, but I am pretty sure that in the future a lot of the stuff that we see in that work will be something on our daily basis. The show also demonstrates some of the social anxiety that we are having right now with robots taking over simple jobs. We just have not got to the part where we actually hunt them down, but there are definitely some people that are against robots doing the job that a human can do, and that will be reflected later on in our history.