Of sentimental robots and emotionless humans

Do sentiments shrink and shrivel when our life gets coated with social media protocols?

Someone with a long life of ups and downs, happiness and sorrow, achievements and failures, vanity and humility, friendships and acrimony, nobleness and wickedness, all cropping up and subsiding at different times and stages of life, with whatever end result, can be buried forever in social media by one stroke of an abbreviation: RIP. In the very next breath, there is a crisp birthday greeting for another friend: HBD. Seconds later, the guy uploads the benefits of eating two bananas a day, followed by changing his profile picture on his handle, showing him enjoying beer in a pub.

Most condolence messages

and greetings come from robotic gadgets: “Hey Siri, send a condolence text to …” Or “Send a birthday greeting to ….” The emotionless journey between condolences and congratulations is now just as long as the width of a key on the keyboard, or just the tip of the tongue giving voice commands as the typing substitute.

Social media, being terribly short of words, is equally short on emotional quotient. The other day, I got a robotic text message from a ‘friend’ in response to my phone call: “Busy. LMK-FAH.” My head remained in a state of spin trying to decipher the abbreviations.

Fortunately, I got an opportunity to seek a clarification from him as he descended unannounced on my residence in the evening to seek help in arranging his appointment with a doctor. He casually informed me that “Busy. LMK-FAH” was an automated response to unattended calls which meant “Busy. Let me know – For any help.” I told him that my call was in fact to help him out with his appointment, and not for seeking help. “Better not be ‘senti’,” was his advice. I realised he meant ‘sentimental’. Thank God he said “senti” and not “mental” for “sentimental”!

Robots such as Siri or Alexa are programmed to interact with humans when the user speaks a prescribed word. They stay alert to respond when you speak the prescribed word to initiate conversation. Minor software tweaking, may be accidental, can record every conversation that takes place within their range 24x7. I wonder why people pay so much for planting moles around them.

Perhaps, these gadgets have of late become very useful. They listen to us while hardly anyone else does. They even respond and obey commands, giving a wonderful feeling that one is not otherwise privileged to enjoy.

There’s an old saying about important government communications: A clerk writes to his counterpart in another department, with their respective bosses just doing nothing in between when the communications are routed through them. That’s how clerks rule. It’s true in social media communications between unconcerned humans, which originate from a programmed robot on one side and rest with another programmed robot for saving, filing and storing them in the gadget or on i-cloud or such unknown places, whether it is read by the user or not, on the other end. That’s how robots rule humanity.

We humans are losing our emotions and our sentiments are drying up, a stage has come for Tim Cook and the leaders of the ongoing technology revolution to put an ‘emotions chip’ into social media devices for a complete reversal of roles. We will end up with sentimental robots and emotionless humans, creating an ‘in’-different world.

THE EMOTIONLESS JOURNEY BETWEEN CONDOLENCES AND CONGRATULATIONS IS NOW JUST AS LONG AS THE WIDTH OF A KEY ON THE KEYBOARD