We are an automated society. I came upon this realization today while my floor scrubbing robot was cleaning my kitchen and dining room floors, the dishwasher was doing the dishes and just after I had installed the automatic shower cleaning device in my shower. You know the one, with the two maids that scour your shower after every use. The sound of the automatic cat box cleaner do it’s time saving chore of scooping the cat litter and depositing it into a little receptacle that only requires I toss the little bag into the trash on a regular basis. Why, even the city trash collection is automated. Someone drives the truck, stops at a house and an arm comes out and lifts the plastic trash can and dumps it into the truck.
I recall as a kid there were three men to collect the trash. One drove the truck, the other two, one on one side of the truck the one on the other, got off and tossed the contents of the metal trash containers into the back of the truck. Then the giant compactor pushed all the wet, smelly trash back against the back wall of the garbage truck. The men would walk along behind or sometimes in front of the truck emptying the cans of two or three houses, then hop back on the truck and ride a few houses down and then start again. When I got older, I had a friend who was a garbage man. They didn’t call them garbage men by then, they were “sanitation engineers”. Same thing, different name. He had a garage full of some really cool stuff that he would salvage from people’s garbage. Statuettes, lamps, pictures…it took 7 truck loads to clean out the garage from his bachelor apartment and fill up the garage of his married life home. But, hey, he had some cool stuff. Now, all the romance is gone.
Last night I saw an advertisement for a robotic wheelchair. What an incredible device. It had two wheels with substantial tread about the size of stroller wheels. These wheels could be controlled to sit on top of each other to increase height, thus enabling a person to play basketball, dance, reach for things that would have otherwise been unreachable. It will even climb stairs! What an amazing machine! Automation at it's finest.I have a machine to wash my dishes, my floor, I have a garage door opener that I can activate from my car, my television tuner can be preprogrammed to automatically tune to a specific channel at a specific time, I can even record a program when I’m not home. All with the touch of a button. At the mall I can get on an escalator and ride up a flight or two and at the airport I can step onto a conveyor belt that will move me along to the next gate. I wonder, as man evolves if our index fingers will become long and muscular and our legs and arms will become smaller. Will we eventually begin to look like E.T.? What’s going to happen to my 1972 AMF Roadmaster bicycle? Will it eventually end up in some archeological dig where scientists with tiny arms and legs scratch their heads and puzzle over what it might be and what it might have been used for?
