This Is Not About Robots

“Stop bitching about robots already.”

This is my twelve-year-old son London talking to me.

“I am just saying we should have way more robots by now. It’s 2013 already.”

That was me. And it’s true.

Those of us who were children during the cold war, an era which featured a nearly unprecedented growth in technological innovation, came to have a lot of expectations for our personal futures. We are all currently disappointed one way or another.

We have all seen the memes recently asking where our flying cars are, or jet-packs, or Marty McFly’s hoverboard (not to mention his self-tying sneakers). And we really were supposed to have all those things by now. As late as 1985 we were all positive that we would have them all by “the year 2000” let alone by 2013. But we don’t have any of them. And these are all now great examples of our collective disappointment.

But these are not my personal disappointments. Even when I was ten years old I knew those things sounded too good (read: far too dangerous) to be true. I understood enough about the regulatory nature of the American people to know not to expect the freedom to zoom about the skies at will like some kind of over-sized Alabama firefly orgy. I was a strange kid. But I did believe the future would be saturated by two things: Velcro shoes and Robots. Seriously, why would anyone ever tie shoelaces when Velcro exists in the world?

I live in a fairly large house with five transients. Sure, technically these proto-hobos are my children, but they are not like me. I sleep in the same bed in the same room every night. I like to think I don’t always sleep there alone, if you know what I mean, but really I pretty much do. My children do not. They are children of divorce. They each have a bed in a bedroom in our home, and they more or less keep all their stuff there, bathe there, make messes there, “forget” to brush their teeth there. But they don’t always sleep there.

Every night some of these children will sleep in the spaces I provide for them, but almost every night some of them sleep somewhere else as well, presumably with their mother. And while there is a nearly recognizable pattern to where each child may be and when, it is not a pattern one would want to use to make any kind of reliable predictions. It is a sort of controlled chaos. The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics tells us that it may be impossible to observe the specific location of a particle while also knowing how fast it is traveling. I find this to be true of my children. If I know where one is, I can’t know when or how fast he might be going, and vice-versa. This is either because the field of quantum mechanics deals in the basic building blocks of the universe and so its probabilistic rules naturally extend to describe even complex organisms operating within the universe, or because I have too many kids. To a certain extent, divorce has made my children free as birds. They have options I never had.

I knew from a pretty young age I would not share my parents’ particularly behavioralistic religion in my adult years. It never made any sense to me. It still doesn’t. I used to spend hours daydreaming and imagining what my future might be like, because I knew it would be different from the way my parents lived. I made plans. I set goals and worked toward them. I was a chess player as a kid, and I heard someone say once that in a chess game, if you can think just twelve moves ahead, and imagine all possible outcomes, the best moves would become obvious and you could never lose. I know this now to be both incorrect and more or less impossible. But I believed it at the time, and from an early age I have always tried to think twelve moves ahead in life, and have always tried to imagine all possible outcomes. I was sure I knew, at the very least, all possible options for my future, so that one of the outcomes I imagined would be correct, and hopefully one of the good ones.

But the thing is, kids are dumb. I never imagined anything like the reality I am living now.

I still tie my own shoes, with laces, exactly the way I learned to do it when I was four years old, way back in the 1900s. Today I am wearing a pair of boots with one of those laces where the aglet has come off one end, and so to properly tie it I have to twist the end of the shoelace into some half-assed point and sneak it through the eyelet. It is 2013, and Velcro still exists in the world.

 I also spend a lot of time cleaning my house, doing dishes and laundry daily, and constantly sweeping floors, because five transients make quite a mess. These things piss me off on a daily basis, not because I hate the work, and not because I resent my kids, but because it is 2013 and I should have fucking robots to do chores for me. I was positive that by the time I was 40 I would not need to cook or clean or do any of the time-robbing daily maintenance which currently consumes my evenings. Just like the innovative sewing machine and the subsequent ability to purchase mass-produced clothing on the cheap freed up several hours daily my great-great-grandmothers once used to make clothes for their families (allowing them more time to pursue racism), robots were supposed to free me from the mind-numbing drudgery of my household chores, allowing me more time for drinking and watching reality TV (which is definitely better than racism?).

What did we get instead of robots? The fucking internet. And we never even saw it coming. I am not complaining about the internet, it is really great and all, and it is the only reason you are even reading this crap right now anyway. But the internet can’t take the clothes from the washer and put them in the dryer (and why the hell do we still have two separate machines for that?). In just twenty years internet technology has improved and changed our lives in ways we couldn’t have imagined just ten years ago. And yet the best robot I can buy will only vacuum my floor. No doubt if robots were useful for masturbation we would be awash in them. Pornography drives all relevant innovation. Think about it.

But even back in the day I knew, even without the robots I would at least have a wife. And yet here I am, thirty years in the future, a single, male, domestic slave.

 London doesn’t know that it’s not really robots I am bitching about.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, if it isn’t truly descriptive of the nature of all life created by assemblies of the particles whose irrational behavior it describes, is at least a pretty good metaphor for life. In my life it is doubly effective. It seems I can know neither where I am nor how fast I am traveling. The only thing I know about the future is that it will not be, in any way, how I imagine it will be. The only thing I can be certain of is that my predictions are wrong. And strangely that works for me now. I am just sweeping the floor, waiting to see what happens next.