Seeking a heartbeat in a world of robot overlords

It happened at the grocery store the other day as I stood at the end of a long checkout line. And it happened last week when I went into the bank.

Both times, an employee walked up to me and said, “You know, the robots can do that for you.”

Well, that wasn’t their exact words, but that was the gist of it. At the grocery store I could have breezed through the convenient automatic checkout line instead of waiting for Beverly to swipe each item past the scanner. At the bank I could have deposited my check in the convenient ATM instead of having Carol run it through the little machine on her counter.

And then I could have dashed back home with my business conveniently finished, without having to go through the “inconvenience” of having Beverly or Carol smile at me and ask me how my day was going.

Both times, when the employees offered me the convenience of robotic assistance, I smiled and said, “No thanks.” But I gazed deeply into their eyes to see if their souls had been fully commandeered by our robot overlords. I didn’t say anything to explain why I refuse to use those automated conveniences, because, after all, the robots are listening. You can’t even whisper what you want to say to a fellow human being, because the robots can read lips.

Oh, the robots wouldn’t do anything to you right then. That’s now how they work. But they’ll let you know that your rampant humanism won’t be tolerated.

That’s why, as I tried to check out of the Canadian resort where I had been fishing a few weeks ago, Christine couldn’t process my payment without a 20-minute delay. “The Internet just went down,” she said, “and I can’t figure the exchange rate without it.”

And that’s why, when I tried to buy some landscape lights at Home Depot a week or so before that, the clerk said, “We just had a power failure, so I can’t check you out.”

Both were only short delays, but still the robots had made their point: “Don’t try to ignore us at the grocery store or the bank. We’ll take our revenge somewhere else.”

I suppose I have no right to complain about the robots running our world, since I was sort of a pioneer in creating them almost 50 years ago.

It was only a summer job between college terms in 1967, so I’m not taking all the blame. Still, I played a part in their rise to power, so I guess you could say the blood is on my hands. Or whatever it is that passes for blood in robot-kind.

I worked for Belke Manufacturing in Franklin Park, Illinois, a company that engineered and serviced robots to do the dirty work in factories that specialized in metal plating.

The robots ran along tracks in the ceiling, with their arms hung down to lift wire baskets in and out of chemical vats, where metal parts were being soaked and plated.

The nerve center of the whole factory was a box about the size of a refrigerator, with a shiny metal disk the size of a manhole cover. The disk was punched with a coded series of holes, and as the disk slowly rotated, the machine read the code and ordered the suspended robots which chemical vat to travel to and what to do with the basket that was soaking there.

My job was to connect color-coded wires in the fridge-like box, and to check to see that the aluminum disk was coded properly according to schematics in a folder. Three other workers checked to make sure that the robot rails were properly spaced, that colored metal tabs between the rails were attached in the right order, or that the robots’ arms raised or lowered to the right levels.

And when our work was finished, we fired the whole thing up to make sure that everything was OK: Four men standing silent in a vast factory abuzz with robotic industry, and not another heartbeat in the entire place.

As a young man, I felt my heart swell with pride as I watched the robots work. My father died of esophageal cancer, the result of breathing and swallowing toxic steel mill fumes for decades. I had watched my own skin peel off from the toxic furnace smoke at a gas pipeline summer job.

But here was the future, I felt as I watched the robots work. Man would be freed of that degrading, dangerous labor. The robots would be our slaves, and we would be their masters. They would do our bidding, and we would be free.

Now, fifty years further on, I see that I was wrong. The robots weren’t simply subservient; they were patient. And the image of that hollow factory, empty of humans yet buzzing with mechanical activity, lingers in my mind.

I see it when I go into the grocery store with long checkout lines because there are only two clerks working.

I see it at the empty bank with a single teller standing at the counter.

I see it at the library when I check out my books with a laser scanner.

Internet shopping, online college courses, social media interactions…empty factories, all.

How long will it be before you go to the grocery store, bank or library, and the only heartbeat in the place is your own? How long before the only humans you see from morning to night are the ones huddled in your home with you?

For now, I’ll keep waiting in line for Beverly and Carol to smile and ask me how my day is going, but how much longer can we stand up to the robots’ revenge? How long before an inexplicable computer glitch grounds worldwide United Airline passengers for days, instead of just a couple hours? How long before a mysterious hiccup shuts Wall Street down for weeks instead of a single afternoon?

But I won’t mention my fears to Beverly or Carol. We’ll keep our conversation short and simple, because we know there are cold, lifeless eyes and ears, watching and listening.

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