Back to the future
OPINION —
I’m in the airport. There is a tiny robot cruising around, delivering food to customers. Kids are following the robot, laughing. People are taking pictures.
It seems like everyone is talking about AI. It’s on the news. It’s in every newspaper. “AI is taking over the world,” the media headlines declare. “AI replaces 12 million jobs.” “AI wins Miss America Pageant.” AI might be writing this right now. There’s no way to know.
It’s gotten to the point where you don’t even notice artificial intelligence in everyday life anymore. It’s in your phone, your car, it ships Amazon packages, manages warehouses, cleans households, and correcks grammer.
And recently, Simone Giertz, a female Swedish inventor even designed a robot specifically developed to wipe your hindquarters. I’m not joking.
When I first heard about this cavity-sanitizing robot, I didn’t believe it was true, but then I Googled “AI wipe butt.”
There it was on YouTube. A demonstration of a robot helpfully participating in the Morning Ritual. Giertz was posing with her robot. Arms crossed, proudly, wearing the same expression you might expect to see on the portrait of a bank president, except that she was positioned next to a mannequin on a toilet with its pants around its ankles.
The AI developments continue. In Atlanta a new service called Waymo is about to offer robotaxi service. “Robotaxi” means self-driving cab. These vehicles are capable of great distances and are driverless.
Robotaxis are still new, but they already operate in cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, and L.A., where AI taxis currently give upwards of 100,000 rides per week.
I actually tried one of these driverless cabs when I was in Arizona. It was nerve wracking inasmuch as the car was full of screaming passengers. And I was the only human being in the vehicle.
We were speeding down the highway, the steering wheel spinning on its own, car weaving through town, pedestrians staring at my helpless face behind the windows. Some were pointing at me, others were smirking, some made the Sign of the Cross.
I get it. I understand why robotaxiing is the wave of the future. It is convenient, fast, and cheap. But on the “cons” side, when you arrive at your destination you will need to change your trousers.
There are also robot vacuums. A lot of people have them. There are over 14.2 million robot-vacuums in the U.S.
We actually owned a robot vacuum once. It worked fine until my dog had a lower-intestinal emergency while I was away. When I arrived home, I could hear my robot-vacuum happily buzzing through the rooms. The motor was gurgling.
Our entire floor, come to find out, was covered in a substance that will remain unnamed since this is a family column. I will, however, say that the incident left us with no choice but to burn our house down.
Call me old-fashioned, but I do miss an era when robots weren’t in our daily lives. It’s not that I dislike AI altogether, it’s that AI is making things too easy for us. It’s making us lazy.
Once upon a time we didn’t need AI to do our work. We corrected our own grammatical errors, drove our own cabs, and vacuumed our own houses. I’m worried about younger generations. I am afraid there will come a day when we, as a human race, won’t even remember how to wipe our own…
Well, you get the idea.
Sean Dietrich is a columnist, novelist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His column appears in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored 15 books.
