[Translated] Scythe

What did humanity gain and lose by achieving immortality?

First Impression #

I received a recommendation for Scythe from my teammate Tanto. The premise is incredibly fresh. Just hearing the title, I expected it to be about an agricultural society. However, contrary to expectations, the book is set in a future where superintelligent AI has replaced all human government, containing somewhat dystopian elements.

Synopsis #

Contrary to expectations, the emergence of superintelligent AI didn’t bring about a dark world ruled by machines. Rather, humanity flourished and all social problems were solved. In every aspect—environment, politics, technology—the AI (called the Thunderhead in the book) excelled and conquered everything. Everyone lives forever, and everyone lives abundantly without working.

Nevertheless, the one thing humanity couldn’t surrender to software was the right to die or kill. While living forever, population growth became an issue, but they couldn’t hand over the role of killing humans to the Thunderhead. Thus, the scythes who harvest human lives were born. One of the basic requirements for scythes was that they must hate becoming a scythe more than anyone and feel the greatest guilt about harvesting human lives. They demanded the highest level of moral and ethical standards.

Reflections #

The concept of scythes and the conflicts and episodes that emerge as characters go through the scythe apprentice process were entertaining. The story wasn’t predictable, with multiple twists toward the end that made it very enjoyable to read. Moreover, these twists weren’t sudden but utilized information and foreshadowing provided earlier in the plot, which was excellent.

The deepest question this book made me ponder was: what changes would we face if we humans had infinite time? The book refers to our current era as the Age of Mortality—an age when people can die. The characters in the book cannot understand concepts like murder, war, and disease from the Age of Mortality. Nor can they understand many emotions.

We sometimes believe in the romantic notion that while we live finite lives, love is eternal. But if we were to live forever, everything we know would have an expiration date. People in the book believe that even love is finite. Because unless the scythes come, they themselves outlast love.

The Thunderhead says this in the book: In cartoons, we don’t worry when the protagonist or characters get seriously hurt. Because we know they’ll heal and appear before us perfectly fine. In an age where you can’t die even if you want to, all of human daily life has become a cartoon.

As the Thunderhead completely conquered all fields, all jobs became meaningless, and all research or academic pursuits could find no utility beyond self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, the Thunderhead makes humans attend school and allows them to choose careers to provide them with a sense of purpose. In a world where you can achieve anything without any cost if you want it, no one intensely desires anything, and everyone stagnates having lost their purpose.

What I could feel through this book was that, like those common lines in comics, “Not everything beautiful is eternal” or “It’s beautiful because it has an end” might actually exist?