I was surfing through the net and I ran into a story about a new animation being produced in Japan by Yasuhiro Yoshiura of Studio Rikka. The production is called Time of Eve and it is a story of humans living alongside near-human androids.

But there is so much that can be read into the tale, which is centered around a unique cafe–called Ibu no Jikan (Time of Eve)–where androids and humans intermingle on the condition that they do not attempt to determine who is flesh and who is not. Within the cafe, the androids have no identifiable characteristics that distinguish them from the human customers; they look the same, sound the same and act the same.Outside the cafe, however, the androids speak in a more mechanical manner and have digital halos–a particularly beautiful effect–that identify them as robots. One idea, Yoshiura explained to The Daily Yomiuri in a recent interview at his Tokyo studio, had been to identify them with writing on their bodies, unintentionally reminiscent of Jews who were forcibly tattooed during the Holocaust. (Yomiuri Newspaper)

Yoshiura says. “I wasn’t out to try and make this some sort of social statement. It’s just about a guy who’s got this beautiful woman he lives with, and he’s thinking, ‘She’s cute, but I can’t do anything ’cause she’s not human…ah, what should I do?’” I found this article pretty interesting. What IF things turn out that way? What if in the near future we start living with androids that are so perfect that we can not tell between Human nor Robot? Would we give them rights? Would we respect them as we do humans?

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