too many robots – Lee Duigon

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And if the pepper spray fails…

(Thanks to Marlene for the news tip)

Better living through robotics! At an Amazon.com warehouse in New Jersey recently, a “robot mishap,” as they called it, led to some 50 employees being zapped with a concentrated pepper spray used as… bear repellent! Twenty-four of them had to be taken to the hospital, and one was in critical condition for a while. It seemed a robot “claw” accidentally punctured a 9-ounce aerosol spray can of bear repellent, and woe unto everybody who couldn’t get out or range. (https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-12-10-amazon-warehouse-robot-pepper-sprays-24-employees.html#)

Not a lot of call for bear repellent here in the New Jersey suburbs. We are in much, much greater need of Democrat repellent. But I digress.

Anyway, the union representing the warehouse staff is not amused and is demanding accountability. They say Amazon has unsafe labor practices.

We have had our encounters with robots already this morning. The call us on the phone, interrupt whatever we’re doing, and annoy us. “Hello! This is Jonathan, your Debt Partner!” No it’s not. It’s some robot.

“Alexa! Please pepper-spray my guests!”

Are we really, truly sure we need this many robots?

I like to play games on Pogo. I like to chat with my Pogo friends while we’re playing. It’s relaxing. It’s nice.

My wife plays a lot of Pogo, and she likes to win “badges.” A badge denotes that you’ve achieved something or other in the course of playing a game. Players like to collect badges. I’m not into that, but that’s me.

As I play, from time to time a certain advertisement appears in the chat box, offering you the power to “complete and win hard badges quickly”… by signing up for robots, “Badge Bots,” to play the game for you.

It reminds me of someone I knew long ago, who was too lazy to go to the unemployment office to collect his check. We called him “Clams”–although the average clam was a lot more dynamic than he was.

Sheesh! Are we grown too flaming lazy even to play our games? Where’s the fun in having some robot play your games for you? Are we too dull, too inert, even to relax? And what kind of gavone brags about all the badges he “won” by letting Badge Bots win them? Where’s the achievement? How many of us, really, are that dishonest with ourselves?

Other robots turn our lights on or off–you have to shell out for “smart” lights that will obey the robot’s order–because we’re too torpid to flick a switch.

I heard somewhere that the civilized world has an epidemic of obesity. I wonder why. Well, at least we still have the energy and the drive to stuff our faces non-stop. Is that the one thing we don’t want robots to do for us?

I’m reminded of a story Ray Bradbury told in The Martian Chronicles, a poignant, somewhat poetic piece in which all the human colonists on Mars are dead and gone but their robots mindlessly keep performing their now pointless tasks of housekeeping the now uninhabited houses.

Let’s not go there, okay?