Robots?

 

I have a friend named Krista who is fascinated with robots.  I think they’re intriguing as well – browse the internet for robot innovations and you may be surprised how far the technology of robotics has come.

Robots, however, represent a trap which is of great allure to the human mind.  Robots represent familiarity.  When you program a robot for a specific task, and put that robot to service, there is an expectation of that robot and after enough fulfilled expectations comes familiarity.  The Roomba is quite popular, because it can vacuum your carpet, avoid steps and other obstacles, and report back to its recharging dock without any human intervention whatsoever.  After using a Roomba a few times, you know what to expect.

In a state of progression that runs seemingly parallel to robotics is the trending of society to be less personable and more efficient – like robots. 

Applebee’s is a renowned restaurant franchise in the United States and also a member of the Better Business Bureau.  Companies in the BBB enjoy the benefits of inherent trustworthiness and greater exposure to consumers, on the premise that they maintain a certain level of service that is satisfactory to BBB criteria.  Aside from annual evaluations from the BBB itself, there are also consumer complaints which are investigated by the BBB.  What this all means is that you, as the consumer, are guaranteed adequate service from Applebee’s and the employees of Applebee’s are guaranteed that they’ll be acting similarly to robots.  Dull, inanimate, but efficient!

Mission statements, charters, company mottots and standard operating procedures are all company jargon which assist in sculpting each employee into the model worker that the company desires them to be.  At a certain level, a certain size – its threshhold is beyond me – a business begins to look at results not by the expressions on the faces of the people who pay for their services, but by the numbers that those transactions and experiences yield.  By my supposition, it is during the transition from facial expressions to numbers that employees transition from people into robots.

And it is further supposition on my behalf that the business model used by these companies has worked its way into the implementations of smaller businesses as well.  When you see something that works, it seems natural to study why it works and emulate it.  So even non-franchise businesses begin to create robot factories. 

And to my understanding, this is all thanks to our ever human desire to nail down reality, keep this life under control, and know what to expect throughout our day.  It is not difficult to see the benefit of this attempt at nailing down reality: there are no bad surprises, there is an abundance of (hopefully) bacteria-free food, and everyone is nice to you all of the time, because they have to be.  A faint sensation within you indicates that this hospitality at Applebee’ is not genuine, but it’s not that important because you will probably not know your server beyond this experience.

It can be difficult to see the side effects of human-robot production, but the side effects are so very fundamental and broad that you can see it everywhere you go!  In traffic, you see remote islands all around you: people in their cars, expressionless faces, stopping and going, numb to the once dismaying traffic jams.  Focused on where they are supposed to be instead of where they are in that moment.  Listening to music, talk radio, or talking on the phone to bypass the undesirable experience of sitting in silence; the one time they could actually reflect on just how miserable they are in that moment.

I typed ‘miserable’ and it felt melodramatic to me, but upon further lament, I stand by it.  Your philosophy may be different, but my philosophy is that life is not inherently miserable.  Life is not good, and it is not bad.  Life is mu, as stated in “The Zen of Motorcyle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig.  Mu is Japanese for ‘no thing’.  Life is an absence of evaluation, completely vulnerable to your assessment of it.  Life itself does not have influence over you.  ‘ The powers that be’ are not even there.  Life does not exist until your mind wills it to exist.

I feel that this is difficult to explain, as it is a mantra which is native to me by now and I must often remind myself of how confused I felt when I first thought of life in this way.  That which fills the nonexistent container of life and  manifests it into being is called culture.  Culture is an accumulation of feelings which bond together to become an unspoken law.  It is teenage culture to listen to music all the time, and seek music that is both ‘good’ by their evaluation and also unheard of by many.  It is American culture to celebrate our independence on the fourth of July.  It is human culture, in this day, to remain always distracted and free of the terror of boredom and reflection.

In describing my perception of life and its nothingness, it is likely that you find it disturbing.  To take a very grand idea and strip it of all its allure and exaltation is indeed frightening.  Life is nothing.  Life is nothing.  Life is nothing.  I can continue typing it but that does not make it any less strange.  But in acknowledging that life is nothing, you may do anything.  In understanding that it is not necessary to nail down reality and make it ours, we have license to exist more freely. 

If we do not strip life down to nothingness, life will strip us down until we are nothing.  This I am sure of.  As a child and throughout school I was very creative.  I was known around the school as the kid who made comic books.  My GPA suffered as a result of my love for drawing, my love for expression.  Because my GPA suffered, I began to draw less, until I did not draw much at all.  When I graduated and began taking classes to become a firefighter at a local technical college, I had completely stopped drawing except in very idle moments when I was bored and required distraction.  Life stripped away my creativity and I stopped looking at the world around me in an artistic sense.  My writing has also suffered.  I can rattle off a number of things which have suffered from ‘life’.

But it’s time to wrap this entry up before I ramble on and on.  I believe there is a way to cease living like a robot: always be conscious of the moment you are in.  There is much around you to enjoy.  A child in the store is not just a child in the store, but someone who will wave at you if you wave first.  The interaction is anything you make it to be!  Life is nothing until the container is filled by your mind, and your mind can will reality into being as purposeful and fun as you allow it to be!

I am tired of robotic servers, robotic cashiers, processions of unremarkable and inanimate people headed to work so that they can act like robotic customer service representatives.   Your job may require you to fulfill certain requirements, but each tiny, unsupervised moment is another chance to act human again. 

I mention this foremost because I notice these traits in myself and I must be vigilant to exterminate them.  My friend Michale asked me yesterday if I ever get used to seeing dead bodies and it was my inclination to immediately answer yes, and it was in that moment that I realized that my own life required nothingness so that I could allow my own humanity to fill nothingness of life and salvage me from my own robotic ways. 

Seeing dead people is an atrocity each and every time and should remain as such.