There are days when I come home from work and find myself sitting around doing..absolutely nothing!
Not watching tv, not surfing, not cleaning, not even stirring from my position of stillness to pick up the phone ringing off its hook. No- I am just lying there sprawled on the couch, thinking nothing, feeling nothing -just frozen in a haze of the zero.
I wonder whether this is a bio-chemical reaction to exhaustion (not that I lift and carry heavy stones for a living!) when my brain cells churn to a slow halt, or purely a psychological house-keeping reaction. In any case, it’s a temporary system crash till my brain does an automatic re-start.
Which brings me to draw an obvious parallel between myself and my laptop-are we both similar in that we follow the code, open/close windows as directed, operate on a system based on pre-entered knowledge but occasionally give in to that momentary lapse of reason? Are human beings increasingly becoming machines, just when we are taking these grand steps towards making machines more human?
Cisco talks about ‘the human network’. There are smart washing machines that come with a hand-wash option and there are refrigerators that will eventually learn to place orders to the grocery store when they are running out of milk. Your car reminds you to put on your seat-belt the way your mom constantly reminded you to tie your shoe-lace and did not stop till you did. There are tools that tell you which way to turn to get to that steakhouse instead of the chemical reactions bubbling away in your brain-the reactions that build memory from images you’ve seen and thoughts you have unconsciously thought. There is even an ad that goes ‘When you turn on your car, does it return the favor’.
And then here we are-with our often-mechanical existence. We get up like clockwork every day, brush our teeth the exact same way each morning, reach out to turn on the shower with the exact same movements as the day before, taking precisely the same amount of time to get showered (except on days you are wearing a skirt and need to shave your legs of course!) and dressed. We flip through tv channels without really stopping to pause on any one; we no longer remember what encyclopedias were, unless you mean the Wikipedia sites that you browse every now and then.
So is life becoming a perpetual episode of ‘Trading spaces’ between us and the machines that we cannot live without now? Is there anything wrong with leaning towards a more efficient, system-driven (some may say lazier) way of life? Probably not-as long as we still remember to smell the roses as we turn into our driveways, to laugh at George Bush being mimicked, to get those warm fuzzies when we snuggle into our loved one’s arms and to cry over old, sappy movies when boy-met-girl.
