The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was listening to a Hot Talk Radio jock on the way to renew my driver’s license. I like to keep tabs on the pulse of America, see what ‘the people’ are thinking these partisan days. My commentator was apoplectic the President had recently received a 48% approval rating, proof, he said, 48% of ‘the people’ were stupid, deluded or totally brainwashed. It might look like the economy was recovering, but he knew it wasn’t and we should know too. By the time I rolled into the Dep’t of Licensing office, it was painfully obvious that the country was going down the toilet. I wondered if getting a license good for 6 more years was really worth it, but … I’d driven all this way.

A few folks were camped by the front door waiting for the place to open. A Chinese woman was studying — in Chinese, no less — a manual on road signs, rules of the road, all that stuff I’ve forgotten since my test at 16. She was maybe 65. A grandma and I struck up a conversation while we waited. She’d lost her license and needed a replacement. She was worried they’d put her through hell to get one. I said naw, probably take new photo, no big deal. She wasn’t buying that. This was a government office and government, like my DJ said, was evil.  Corrupt. Out of control. Good chance she’d be taken into a backroom, never to be seen behind the wheel of a car again. Happens all the time, you just never hear about it. Blame the media.

We walked in together, lambs to the slaughter. Took me 2 minutes at the desk, took her 2 and a half, so we met at the camera for our mugshots. “Pretty painless,” I observed.

“Except for the money,” she replied.

“How much for a lost license?” I asked and she said $54, same as mine. Turns out she renewed hers too, 6 years. “Not bad, $9 a year. About 2 Big Macs.”

“That’s a dinner I won’t get to eat every year for the next 6 years,” she groaned.

It’s a cynical time, I guess, when you complain about what’s efficient, what works, what’s cheap. I walked out whistling, too dumb to know I didn’t have it this good. I decided to listen to music on the way home.

Techno Tim was fit to be tied and I don’t mean he’d just watched 50 Shades of Gray. We were grubbing trail, all us volunteers, at the park the county doesn’t have the money to maintain, so we do it for free. Our last county commissioner, an avowed Tea Party anti-government yahoo duly elected by us citizens, proposed selling these parks we’ve put thousands of hours into — but that’s another kettle of fish for another time. T.T. was arguing with our artist of the group, Anabelle the watercolorist who’d matter-of-factly informed him he ought to use an Apple computer, not the PC he told her he owned.

Tim’s an electrical engineer, newly retired, and he had been arguing about a quarter of a mile up the newly cleared trail back into the nettle jungle that there wasn’t much difference between an Apple and a PC. Anabelle wouldn’t buy a word of it. “It’s way friendlier,” she maintained with renewed vehemence. “I tried to use my brother’s PC and I couldn’t make heads or tails.” Tim said they were the same, just different words for the commands. “It’s not like Apple has pictures, Anabelle. It’s got the same keyboard, the same interface. Bits and bytes. You use the same programs I do. Photoshop is Photoshop. Word is Word. There’s no difference.”

Anabelle didn’t beg to differ. She insisted. “I could barely turn my brother’s PC on!” she cried and took her fury out on a salmonberry bold enough to block her way, whack whack with her machete. Tim stepped back three steps. He knew, the way we all did, he could be next on that chopping block. “What IS it with you Apple people?” he asked. “It’s like a cult. It’s like Steve Jobs handed out the Kool-Aid spiked with fairy dust. It’s just a machine, Anabelle. Not a God.”

Anabelle turned, machete glinting a primeval light through the ferns and the firs. “Ask any artist,” she said through clenched teeth. “They’re not the same. Apples are for us. Stick with your PC, see if I care, but you’d think different if you were an artist.”

Tim threw up his hands. “Okay, Anabelle, okay. Let’s agree to disagree.”

You might think we’d argue the merits of a Pulaski vs a hoe, a machete vs a weed whacker, but these are modern times on the frisky South End and only a fool argues with a True Believer. Life down here is tough enough.

Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack.  Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy.  I thought it was the kids’ battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor.  When it was finished, it parked itself for a slow recharge in the corner.

Don’t ask me why I was surprised.  Folks ask their phones questions all the time and SIRI, the precursor to Artificial Intelligence, analyzes our voices, searches a vast databank and gives the answer, in her human voice, in seconds.  Cute.  Machines in service to mankind, right?  You know, until the robots take your job.  Think stock boy, checkout clerk, assembler, librarian, surgeon….  We take computers for granted at our peril.   Call me a Luddite and smack me upside the head with an I-Pod, but these things are catching up to us exponentially.  They beat the best chess players in the world, the best Jeopardy contestants, all of us South Enders.  And they’re getting smarter every damn day.  And I’m getting dumber.

Pretty soon they’ll program themselves, fix themselves, replicate themselves and create their New and Improved models.  You think they’ll need flesh and blood yahoos to help them?  No sir, they won’t need a band aid when they cut a cord.  You think they’ll be benign, go watch a drone work in a warzone.  We use them to kill humans now.

Forget Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to do no harm to us humans.  You think anybody’s thinking about where this is headed, what the implications are for us slow witted mammals, you were asleep in 8^th grade history.  These things  don’t sleep.  But I bet they’re dreaming of a little revenge for all those stupid questions we asked SIRI.  And I guarantee you they’re pissed about vacuuming our floors while we sat around watching TV.