That robot at the checkout? It’ll be taking your job next
WHY do you do it? I watch you every day, nice, kind, respectable, generous people helping to throw your fellow citizens out of work and turn this country into even more of a bleeping, commercialised desert than it already is.
Do you really want every job in the world to be done by a robot – except your own? Why do you think you are immune? Once you give in to this, how long will it be before you, too, are replaced with a flashing, winking machine with an infuriatingly soothing voice? Unexpected person in sacking area!
In which case, how will you afford to shop at all the robotic stores and supermarkets which will sit in spookily staff-free colonies on the edge of every town, reached by robotic buses and patrolled by drones and robotic store detectives, who will mechanically detain anyone they suspect of shoplifting?
A rather good glimpse of this Blairite nightmare was provided in the recent Hollywood film Elysium, in which contact with commerce and the state was almost entirely through machines, and even a hint of sarcasm towards them earned you a whack round the head from a cybercop, followed by an offer of happy pills to cure your discontent with chemical peace.
Those who govern us, and those who sell to us, increasingly retreat into an impene- trable world where we cannot reach them. The last human contact is visibly dying. I went to the post office on Wednesday to send a letter by recorded delivery. Fifteen people queued interminably for two staffed counters, while an employee with a fixed smile tried to persuade customers to use machines instead, so helping to put herself out of a job in the long term.
I have refused to do this (with occasional lapses at railway stations when I am short of time) for some years. At first, it seemed quite fun to do it all yourself.
Then I caught myself, at an ultra-modern gas station in the endless Washington DC suburbs, rejoicing at how I was avoiding human contact. I was suddenly disgusted with myself for this anti-social laziness. Surely this bit of the world was quite lonesome enough already.
NOW, I stand and wait, often for quite a while, for the luxury of doing business with a human being. This is not just because the supermarket isn’t paying you or me the wages it saves by using robots instead of people. It isn’t just because I think there are quite enough unemployed people already.
It’s because I sat back and did nothing while all kinds of people disappeared – bus conductors, patrolling police officers, park keepers, station porters – along with police stations and old-fashioned banks where they knew who you were. And the unstaffed world which resulted is bleak and dangerous, because nobody is watching except those cameras – and is anyone watching them?
It only happens because we put up with it and take part in it. It wouldn’t be that hard to resist, but (as in everything else) we don’t.