The Immigrants Are Coming! The Immigrants Are Coming!
I know a lot of folks who are upset as hell about our porous borders. We got Mexicans coming up through Texas, Central Americans sneaking in through Arizona, Cubans boating into Florida, Microsoft retirees rolling into the South End. It’s apparently no more possible to secure the bridge onto the island than it is to guard the southern borders. This last week the Governor of Wisconsin, running for President but fading fast, proposed a fence on the Canadian border. I guess those disenchanted hockey players up north might be contemplating a mass exodus. Over in Europe the refugees from the Middle East are flooding the continent.
Me, I’m not too worried about Canadians. I’m worried about the immigrants we’re building in Amazon, at GM, in factories across America. Robots! That’s what worries me. Job-takers. Amazon wants to use drones to make deliveries door to door. Forget building a wall — they’ll just fly over. Gated community? Not unless they put up a canopy over the entire suburb.
Computers with bodies. Robots with attitude. Artificial intelligence smarter than me and my neighbors. Just what we need…. We’ll look back with nostalgia at the Hispanic crews who used to manicure the fescued yards of the wild South End, folks who you could talk to, folks who ate lunch at the Diner, real folks, flesh and blood folks. With families. And dreams.
The only dream a robot’s gonna have is to take your place. They already hypnotized most of us now. We live in their world, the virtual, digitized one we still think is in our control. Oh yeah, the immigrants are coming all right. We’re bringing em in like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Only they take over while we’re wide awake.
Hits: 77
Immigrants are Coming, Part 2
Someday, a tiny LED light will begin to blink on a set of 3D Full Immersion Goggles, announcing a major event, perhaps the start of the Superbowl or an agreement that heralds a new era of world peace. Man’s Best Friend 2.0, a robot dog, dutifully trundles to the goggles and retrieves them, without even a peep from his master’s voice.
The goggles are positioned over eyes and ears, and while people en mass across the nation and the world find themselves transported to a 3-D enhanced world of interactive light and sound, a great improvement over the simple method originally employed by the ostrich when he stuck his head into the ground, the now invisible robot army of Roombas, automatic lawn mowers, and android carpenters commandeer upper and middle class homes across the land.
But wait, the few remaining Mexican laborers trimming trees or waiting for a job offer outside of Home Depot, notice the job stealing robots have began a RoboRevolution with laser levels set to “kill” and electric hammers modified to fire automatically. The displaced Hispanics, unable to afford 3-D Goggles on their minimal wages, and actually aware of the danger spreading across the real world, can finally do what they’ve dreamed of for a long, long time. Payback is a bitch, robots, when flesh & blood workers hammer and chainsaw the mechanical invaders back to whence they came, into piles of plastic, metal, and wire. Rust to rust, the operating system returns to The One who made it (read your EULA agreement)
Soon the the proper order is restored, with humans again in control (or out of control depending upon your point of view), and the 1% who almost lost their privileged position due to their own creations, are back on top. And the real heroes? They were gladly offered their old jobs back. With a 50 cent an hour raise.