 |
| "Simon" by Tim Holmes, 36 x 24 |
A week later it calls to say you don't have to write to any of your relatives any more- it has that covered. In fact you can just give it a list of the books you were going to read and the films you want to see and it can synopsize all of that and only send you the stuff you would have remembered or that made an impact on you, leaving out all the extraneous crap. You go home anyway and discover that your kids are much better entertained by the robot and would rather take their dinner with it than with you. Your friends agree that it replaces you even better than you yourself, without any of the down side, so you can go do whatever you want! There, now are we happy?
I think it would behoove us to look behind the curtain of our relentless drive toward progress. One
of the things we naturally assume is that life can be divided into
good and bad, work and play, in and out, up and down–for us to choose between. Not so fast, I
say! It could be that after we replace our work selves that we find that what we miss are those very things we thought we hated. Think of your creative pursuits:
cooking, sewing, gardening, building something in the garage. All those are
things we have mechanisms for so why do you do it? Can the same not
be said for much of what else we mechanize? I might get a
self-driving car but I actually like driving. There is in fact so
much of life I would really miss if it were all done for me! As machines take over the world, we
would be smart to ask what our lives are worth before we no longer
have a choice about how we are going to live them!
No comments:
Post a Comment