You Know What We Really Need...?

Photo by Tara Winstead

You know what we really need is like a robot that can vacuum your entire floor or something.

That way, we don’t have to worry about it, cause it’s a huge pain.

And also, what about another robot that does all the dishes: like, washes them, dries them, and puts them back on the shelf. That’d be great. Can you imagine?

And we need a robot to mow the lawn and cut our hair, and bathe the cat and buy the groceries. These things are all so mundane and empty, they take up too much headspace, distracting us from the real business of life.

If we could finally have a free moment, maybe we’d be able to get something done around here! So, we also need some robotic assistance with picking the children up from kindergarten and visiting our infirm uncle. His house is so far away and traffic is murder that time of day. It just makes more sense to send an electronic delegate in our stead.

We need robotic voting. Why did they choose to make election day on a Tuesday anyhow? They know how busy we’ve been lately and that’s LITERALLY the worst possible time.

And we need automatic breakfast so we won’t have to spend so much time chewing, as well as cars that wash themselves, contactless eye doctor appointments and computerized shopping carts that can go to the “self”-checkout for us.

It’s perfectly reasonable to have robots go scuba diving for us as well. Sure, it’s a moderately enjoyable activity (if the weather is nice that day), but it’s such a pain to drive all the way out there, squeeze yourself into one of those godawful wetsuits, and put on some half-empty, clunky oxygen tank. Just have them take care of it and afterwards they can briefly share a summary of what it was like.

And from here on out, computers will handle our wars. Now, OBVIOUSLY, we’re not saying nobody has to die in war any longer. OBVIOUSLY, war and human death are necessary for our continued development as a people. But we are saying: let’s clean it up a little bit. Just have the computers go to war and when they’re done send us the receipt for how many people need to die, then we’ll have them killed immediately and be done with it. There’s no need for people to waste ALL THAT TIME becoming soldiers, getting trained, dressing up in those scratchy uniforms and driving out to some faraway battlefield! Automated war will really streamline things and hopefully free up some time for us to focus on what’s important.

Or that’s what you’d think… but unfortunately, as we all know technology has not given us MORE free time, quite the opposite in fact! Now we’ve got a thousand emails and messages, phone calls, alarms ringing, and an endless stream random crap to read, watch, and listen to: like our Uncle’s laborious takes on college football and the blog post of some guy we met once in a comedy club six years ago.

What we really need is for the computers to read, watch and answer all those messages. Just talk it out amongst yourselves and when you’re done, put the important messages in a little stacked pile in the corner and we’ll get to them when we have time.

It’s a lot to ask, but if we could manage to implement all of the above items then we’d be finally have time for ourselves. Let them handle all the tiny minutiae of living, that is clearly no longer a good use of our time. While that’s all being taken care of for us, we can climb into a pine box and close the lid. Let them lower it into the ground and put some dirt on top. Alone and uninterrupted down there, we’ll finally be able to get about the business of living.