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ARTS AND CULTURE

Shrugging off the robots

  • 16 September 2014
We created the robots to make our lives easier, to gather and process the abundance of information our society was producing and find more efficient ways of organising our cities, our businesses and our financial affairs. The robots’ computing brains could do this more naturally than we humans ever could.

Our businesses and government institutions began to subject the human beings who worked for them to robotic control. We believed the assurances of those in power when they told us the robots had the best interests of humanity at the core of their programming. However, the societies they have created seem to have little resemblance to the ones we envisaged.

The robots took control of producing the items we needed to survive, turning food and shelter into commodities to be built into abundance, rather than things shared in relationship with those around us. They turned our landscapes into factories, digging out the resources they needed, allowing their waste to pile up and their emissions to pollute the air. They created better systems for moving money from place to place so as to increase the numbers in their spreadsheets, ignoring the lives that were impacted by the flow.

They built systems to organise people more efficiently, replacing names with numbers in order to better identify and track each individual. Seeing people as packages of data allowed them to better control the flow of goods and services to them, but it also meant that irregular flows of data were a danger to the system and had to be eliminated – even if that data represented people fleeing their homes in fear of their lives.   

Human relationships were replaced with reporting processes. Love between couples was reduced to matters of procreation and pleasure. Outer beauty was easier to quantify than inner beauty, and much easier to create products to enhance, and so became the standard by which people in society were judged. The robots had no frame of reference for concepts like the soul, so religion was turned into a set of protocols to be followed without thought.

Our schools were seen as inefficient models for producing productive citizens, so were reprogrammed in order to better fulfil the needs of the system. Subjects more likely to lead people into productive roles were given prominence, while subjects such as music and art were set aside as unimportant to the system as a whole. People from the corporate sector
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