The Robots Are Coming! The Robots Are Coming!
How Corporate America is preparing us for the AI Rebellion...
I take a backseat to no man when it comes to laziness unless the backseat being offered is one of those leather recliners with cup holders and they’re now putting those incredibly comfortable seats into movie theaters and I know for sure because I reclined in one when I watched the Brad Pitt movie Bullet Train if by “watched” you actually mean “saw the beginning and end of the movie with a solid 20-minute nap somewhere in the middle.”
So while I am admittedly lazy I also believe I’m selectively lazy and even though I might be slicing my baloney extremely thin, I’m only lazy when something bores me which unfortunately includes about 92% of all human activities and 100% of all human activities involving power tools or a lawn mower.
On the other hand, if I do get interested in something (like football, baseball, skiing, cartooning, writing…and right now I’m trying to think of a sixth thing I actually give a shit about) no one works harder.
And don’t let any of my family members convince you otherwise (they don’t buy my self-serving analysis) but think about it: how many people go to the trouble to start a blog so they can write an essay that rationalizes their faults?
I work hard at being lazy.
In fact, if they ever have a Laziness Hall of Fame I’ll get in on the first ballot, but that probably won’t happen because when the people who admire laziness get together they’re going to decide constructing that Hall is way too much work and say to hell with it, let’s all go see Bullet Train instead because they have those really comfortable recliners and we can all sneak a nap in before dinner.
Now that I’ve established my credentials as a Hall-of-Fame-level lazy person I believe it gives me credibility when I say I’m appalled by the even more extreme laziness of others.
And we’ll start with…
Self-driving Cars
The automobile industry has gone to great lengths to convince us that actually steering the car you’re riding in is way too much work so you’re going to want a self-driving car in the near future assuming you haven’t already purchased or been run over by one.
But…
According to an article in the Kansas City Star, a semi-new study by J.D. Power (a company that specializes in “analytics, software and consumer intelligence” which considering the crap we buy sounds like a contradiction in terms) says most car owners aren’t all that excited about the new automobile technology, find most of it of little use and/or annoying and think the auto industry spends way too much time and money solving problems car owners don’t actually have.
So if most of us don’t want self-driving cars why do they keep pushing this technology down our throats?
It’s all part of a larger plot.
As I have previously mentioned two or nine times, the automobile industry is using us as guinea pigs to figure out self-driving vehicles because once they get the bugs worked out of the system, Big Business will fire all the Uber drivers and Amazon Delivery truck drivers and long-haul truck drivers because if there’s anything America needs it’s more people out of work and more Bazillionaires building rocket ships shaped like dicks.
I know I’ve used that example before, but I love it because it’s the worst – or best – example of people with much too much money (like Jeff Bezos) trying to one-up their rich friends:
“You climbed Mount Everest? Well, get this: I went into outer space on top of a vibrator!”
And now back to those self-driving cars…
According to the Associated Press, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that from January 2018 to August 2023 it found 956 crashes involving Autopilot and Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” systems which killed 29 people too lazy to put their hands on a steering wheel.
And that’s just the beginning.
AI, Cell Phones and Lying
We’re currently being treated to a series of TV ads – assuming three is series and for my purposes it is – the first one being a sneering voice-over asking us to “remember when” we had to actually use our fingers to press buttons to do an internet search.
If pushing a button is too much work (and an alarming number of people seem to think it is) you can now use voice commands instead, but you might want to keep your voice down or everyone in the immediate vicinity will know you just asked:
“Alexa, show me massage parlors that offer happy endings near me.”
We’re also seeing ads starring the incredibly-lifelike Bella Ramsey that demonstrate how AI can help you tell lies.
In one ad Bella can’t remember the name of some dork she met previously and Apple Intelligence reminds her of the dork’s name so Bella can pretend she remembers him and in another ad Bella hasn’t read an email and Apple Intelligence summarizes what’s in it so she can pretend that she has read the email, so we’re now officially too lazy to make up our own lies.
Which I find disturbing.
Probably because I come from a self-reliant generation that walked 5 miles to school and 10 miles back and both ways were uphill and we proudly produced our own bullshit and unlikely explanations for the rubber blow-up doll we got caught with in the bathroom and didn’t have to ask:
“Siri, give me three reasons for banging an air mattress with a face painted on it and by the way, I could also use an explanation for why I put a garter belt and stockings on it first.”
The younger generation has no appreciation of the hard work involved in coming up with plausible excuses to miss work on baseball’s Opening Day 16 years in a row.
We’re on a slippery slope, people.
Skechers
The people who sell us stuff are now marketing shoes to my previously self-reliant generation that you don’t have to tie or bend over to put on because along with pushing buttons that’s now too much work.
(I’d say a lot more about this footwear abomination, but I need to cut this short and get online and buy some of those shoes immediately…I just hope there’s no button-pushing required.)
Fast Food
I’m currently in LA with my son and we have some sushi restaurants we like to go to which are kinda pricey so we only go maybe once a year and yesterday I remarked that if I ate like that all the time (fresh fish and rice) I’d lose 20 pounds and feel much healthier.
Normally I eat way too much crappy food involving cheese and bacon whenever possible and only stop when I’m feeling nauseous and fear one more bite will turn me into “Mr. Creosote” and if you don’t get that reference, here you go:
My son said, yeah, you’re right, but good, healthy food is expensive so it’s only for the wealthy: they sell the unhealthy food to the less affluent.
And right now I’m thinking of those ads for a crappy chicken sandwich joint featuring sad testimonials from people without friends who try to form intimate relationships with the restaurant’s minimum-wage workers.
“You celebrated your birthday with us because we’re all you’ve got.”
The ads where someone is ecstatic that they finally brought back some unhealthy sandwich and put it back on the menu are even sadder and I once read there are websites manned by people who track the McDonald’s McRib Sandwich’s sporadic appearances (kind of like a Fast Food Bigfoot) so they can let all the other McRib fans know that if they drive all night through three states they can buy a sandwich whose main ingredient appears to have come out of a blender and then pressed into the shape of a rack of ribs which makes no sense because a rack of ribs has bones in it.
I pity those poor, deluded people every time I buy a Double-Quarter Pounder. (Hey, I’m just as susceptible to marketing as the next guy, assuming the next guy also plans to buy a pair of step-in Skechers.)
Wall-E’s Warning
In the 2008 animated movie Wall-E, human beings had to leave Earth because we turned it into a garbage dump and were too lazy to clean it up so we lived on spaceship where we lost the ability to move around under our own power due to the lack of gravity and obesity. We let robots do everything for us while we lay on recliners remarkably similar to the ones in movie theaters and got force fed some food-like substance through tubes.
(Probably liquefied Double-Quarter Pounders.)
Apparently, Wall-E got criticized for presenting an overly-pessimistic view of the future, but here’s a story about a Johns Hopkins study that says Wall-E got it right and if we don’t change our eating habits, by 2030 9-out-of-10 Americans will be obese and from what I can see it’s 8-and-a-half-out-of-10 Americans already:
After reviewing the products we’re currently being offered – self-driving cars, voice-activated phones, shoes you don’t have to bend over to put on, really unhealthy fast food – I think the ultimate goal is to make us fat, lazy and helpless so that when AI finally takes over the world we’ll welcome our Robot Overlords because getting off our comfortable recliners and fighting them will be way too much work.
I wrote this to warn all of you about that danger and I need to spread the message like Paul Revere, but first I have just one question:
Does anyone know where I can get a self-driving horse?
I can relate to lazy!
...but you are right we are doomed if we continue on this path. Also, third-world countries will not be debilitated like us. Ponder Guatemala or Iran marching in while we recline and watch