We, Robot?

A friend of mine is as high tech as they come in his career and personal life. He’s a Mac guy, but not in the insufferable way some people are. He also has a library of vintage science fiction paperbacks, and recently loaned me “Caves of Steel,” the first of Isaac Asimov’s Robot series of novels, published in 1954.

Asimov and others in sci-fi have long propagated the trope that someday in the distant future we will be living side by side with robots. Much in these plots often hinge on the point that robots begin making their own decisions at the expense of their human masters. For the moviegoer, 2001 A Space Odyssey and the Terminator franchise are among many down the years that have given us robots gone bad.

But I’m not so sure that’s where things are headed. Pogo was right. We have met the enemy and he is us. Immersed in the world of social networks, instant messaging and omnipresent texting, we won’t be taken over by robots, we will become the robots. 

Consider if you will the average young person in your home or neighborhood, constantly answering the buzz or tweedle of their wireless device, thumbs blazing away, bits and bytes flying back and forth, most of it sound and fury signifying nothing. Are they communicating or are they merely reacting to electric stimuli like one of Pavlov or Milgram’s subjects? Does their response show free will or has the texter become slave to their wireless service, just one more 21st century communications robot tethered to a chattering device that tells them what to do, when to do it; a device they cannot live or work or play without?

Before you judge me as just one more sci-fi addled baby boomer old fogey, I’ll disclose that I possess a smart phone and have learned to some degree how to use it. I can update social networks on the fly, and I text, send photos, send videos and otherwise marvel at technology. It’s neat, but it’s potentially addictive and compulsive, too. This poor schlub doing a header into a fountain or the rich surgeon driving off a cliff while texting are just the most obvious cyborg-like recent fails in American society.

People are getting sucked so far into these devices that they leave behind much of the human aspects of interaction that make us social creatures. How many of you know more about the daily doings of distant colleagues or celebrities via social networks than you know about your next door neighbor or nearby relatives? Are you checking your email instead of checking in on an elderly friend? 

Go play real Scrabble with some friends, not online with an anonymous stranger. Did you go to the Chattahoochee River Park on a beautiful spring harbinger day and walk along texting, communing with circuits and diodes instead of the nature and people all around you? I saw that, and it seems robotic to me. That’s not even to consider the instant text effect on language, art, writing, culture.

When LOL and TTYL take the place of belly laughs and repartee, we’re closer to Asimov’s android than the backslapping social creatures from whence we came. Ask a high school composition teacher about getting papers submitted in text-style. The puzzled does not compute responses they get from their students who discover that essays include vowels, and must be longer than 140 characters, is a sure reflection of this trend.

Build a real campfire. The electronic campfire is a cold one.