Guest: Schalk Engelbrecht is a research associate with the Centre for Applied Ethics (University of Stellenbosch),

In Jan Rabie’s short story Ek het jou gemaak (“I made you”), a grieving inventor creates a wax statue of his late wife and a robot called “Andries” to fill his house. When asked to define “love”, the robot famously observes that love means “Aanhou beweeg en geraas maak” (“to keep moving and to make noise”). This is perhaps the cost of membership of the ambiguous human species: having knowledge of our mortality, and being able to project a future of which we will not be a part, we feel compelled to make noise, to make an “impact”, to leave a legacy, to ensure that someone or something – a building, a poem, a trust, a charity, a statue, a lineage – testifies to our brief here-ness. Before, that is, we no longer move ourselves or others, but only find ourselves moved by Earth’s diurnal course.