Bring on the robots: fun, caring and no boring small talk

Ihave a lot of time for heartless mechanical beings and always feel slighted on their behalf when they’re “bot-shamed” in the media, so I was pleased to see some positive stories about them this week.

Alexa can now tell whether her owner is having a heart attack, while Amazon has announced its plans for hired drones which would act as a sort of non-judgmental Neighbourhood Watch. Even the humble Furby – lost legions of them currently collecting dust in universal attics – featured on a Radio 4 science show as providing just the right level of stimulation for dementia patients. Good work, unfeeling friends!

Maybe it’s because I’m a stoic that I like them. I hate moaners, and robots don’t moan; even better, they don’t speak until they’re spoken to, so you won’t have to put up with dreary small talk. I feel thrilled by the idea of driverless cars (I can’t drive but I love to drink alcohol in cars) and mechanical pets (the real ones hurt too much when they die) and I like the idea of the entitled classes seeing their cushy jobs being taken over by Artificial Intelligence when

they never spared a spot of sympathy for the working class communities destroyed by mechanisation.

Spare a thought for who’ll put the quinoa on the table in the £2million houses of the metropolitan elite when their gigs go up the Swanee, guv’nor!

So far has the ill-sorted scarifying over the rise of tech gone that it’s even made me reconsider my previously condemnatory reaction to seeing tots with tablets other than Junior Disprin. When three of Coleen Rooney’s children – ranging in age from six years to 15 months – were photographed glued to their iPads in a park, I had the same initial attack of the vapours as every other celeb-stalking stickybeak. But when you actually think about it, what would give the Rooney children more stimulation – the wonders of the childish internet or interacting with their profoundly thick parents, who seem principally interested in getting paralytically drunk and kicking a ball about (him) and shopping and going on holiday (her)?

I’ll go even further; I may have moaned about mobile phones in the past (I don’t own one as I like to juxtapose hyper-sociality with solitude) and I do believe that those who use them while driving vehicles or crossing roads are asking for both trouble and the long arm of the law on their shoulder, but the more I gripe about kids having fun with them the more I remind myself of my own mother moaning at the child me to go outside and play rather than having my nose in a book/ being glued to the TV/playing that loud music. Oldsters have been admonishing youngsters for their choice of diversion/escapism since the fulminations against the novel in the 18th century.

Even when you see couples in restaurants goggling at and Googling on their phones – so what? Some dining companions are dull and some are mesmerising; the varying desire one might feel to whip out one’s trusty mobile could be seen as a litmus test to sort out the sleepers from the keepers.

It’s the suggestion that robots should be companions and carers for the elderly and infirm that finds the usual Amockalypsists having the biggest abdabs about Society Breaking Down. But it’s interesting how these types rarely look after their Aged P themselves, or seek useful paid work caring for the infirm relatives of others, or even volunteer in care homes. If you’re not actually getting your hands dirty helping unfortunate people, don’t sit there pontificating about how robots shouldn’t do it, lest you be called a virtue-signalling hypocrite.

Nothing can be as fascinating as people – but nothing can be as boring too. It ill behoves us to berate the young for their chosen mode of distraction while giving our own a free pass; the only time this wouldn’t be hypocritical would be coming from one of those hardcore off-grid survivalists – and they never sound a barrel of laughs.

So bring on the robots; what’s interesting about human company will survive and what’s not will go the way of the pterodactyl and the plague. It’s called evolution.