Opinion

Machines for living

You are free to remain seated while life is in progress

December 1, 2013 6:00AM ET

by Curtis Brown @MisterBossy

An image released by Tesla Motors, is a sketch of the Hyperloop capsule with passengers onboard.

Tesla Motors/AP

ITHACA, N.Y. — From the Patent Office: I have before me here on the office corkboard yellow, dog-eared clippings from two venerable publications, Wired and the Daily Mail, pinned there months ago by an underling. One is about robots. The other is about supersonic travel. I must remember to give this underling a handsome tip. It is midgets like him on whose shoulders a giant must stand if he is to see anything around here.

"Load yourself into an enormous shotgun shell and shoot yourself 400 miles across the state at 800 mph," the piece in Wired began.

Now why would we want to do that, I thought.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, months ago released a white paper for some boondoggle he called "Hyperloop," basically a pair of elevated maglev tubes firing friction-free passenger-pods up and down California’s Interstate 5. He called it a "cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table," but actually, no, it isn't. It's a cross between a fiber optic cable and the vacuum tube thing my mom used to put checks into in the drive-thru of the now-defunct American Commercial and Savings Bank in my hometown of Ventura, Calif.

Which is to say that Musk, founder of X.com and co-founder of Paypal, wittingly or not, wants to model the future movement of people on the present movement of money and information.

No wonder the world shrugged. It's an old and pointless fantasy. At least as old as "teleportation," which some bright-eyed halfwit dreamt up five years after the first transatlantic phone call. Probably older. Poets have long believed that if their winged words soared over the Aonian Mount they could summon the distant and the dead. Fat chance! They're happy where they are.

Because here's the thing: information travels so that people don’t have to. We visionaries are especially apt to forget this. "Watson — come here — I want to see you," said Alexander Graham Bell into his first phone, beautifully missing the whole point of the thing. Watson I'll bet was all over it. If he was anything like my underlings, he hung up the receiver, rolled sluggish eyes in fat sockets and groaned.

Thus I mused, reader. Then I turned to the other clipping.

"Meet the amazing robots that can move like animals, communicate with humans and even dance and draw," barked the Mail, and I was under the big top tent-flaps in a heartbeat. We at the office have long felt that much of human life simply awaited full automation, and surely such wearisome activities as dancing, drawing and moving like animals are as good a place as any to start.

The piece swept me into the London Science Museum's "International Living Machines"conference. Frankly, I doubt a motlier gang of mystifiers and mountebanks has ever set up stalls in South Kensington. Some hustler was touting his "Shrewbot," a hideous rolling, hunting thing with artificial whiskers. A pack of Italians had some sort of four-footed dancing droid on parade. One leering "Robo-thespian" mimicked onlookers, while another sketched them.

The germ of genius in all this nonsense flashed through me like a contagion. "We don't need robots to work for us," I said to myself.

We need them to play for us.

Travel is awful, vacations are awful. Admit it, reader, you don't want to go anywhere.

On every wristwatch in advertising history, it's 10 minutes past 10 — the precise moment, statistically speaking, I'm pretty sure, when most Americans are sinking into their swivel chairs and into some mindless task. Work is bliss. Workplaces are indoors, climate-controlled and have all the coffee you can drink and all the Internet you can stare at. Sometimes there's pizza or Snapple, and other human figures milling around. Working folks of a certain generation — namely, the generation that had jobs — will attest, as they ease into their autumnal years, that the true springtime of their lives was the lifelong aggregation of those moments when they shut the front door on spouses and children and headed off to the office.

What we really want from a robot is not a worker but a dilettante, an adventurer. Something playful and passionate, to do our hot living for us while we drink lukewarm coffee under cool fluorescents. Thus in 1926, all work and no play made Mr. Televox a very dull robot, despite being the electric age's first. No one wanted a humanoid running around the house turning appliances on and off when shouted at. Nor — despite the genteel racism of the age — did they five years later want a black robot called Rastus to be their butler and house servant.

What they wanted, it turned out, was Elektro. Seven feet tall and powerfully built, Elektro danced, blew bubbles, flashed his eyes, smoked cigarettes and made himself about as useful around the house as a character in an Oscar Wilde play. Shout at this fellow to switch on a light and — if you were lucky — he'd simper, recross his legs, flick his Zippo and fire up another fag. If you were unlucky, he'd exhale in your face. Elektro cut a dash at the 1939 World's Fair, and some twenty years on was dispensing gambling advice and seducing strippers in a small piece of cinema history called "Sex Kittens Go to College."

I was dizzy with thoughts of Elektro and Elon Musk coupling when came the sudden blow. Followed by the feathered glory, the shudder in the loins, the whole shebang. Vacation Robots! For truly, what is the worst sort of recreation a grown person is asked not only to endure but enjoy? Worse than dancing and drawing? Travel. Lawrence Sterne wrote that people traveled for one of three reasons — "infirmity of body, imbecility of mind, or inevitable necessity." Too right. Send an underling — or if you've got one, a robot. Why Sterne went on himself to spend three months in France and Italy and write a book about it, I'll never understand. First thought, best thought.

Travel is awful, vacations are awful. Admit it, reader, you don’t want to go anywhere. Not by train, plane or hyperloop. If you did, you wouldn't be sitting there reading this column. The problem doesn't arise on workdays, when we sit and swivel and watch the data dart about, but what about the dread weekends and holidays? What about the dog days of summer, when everyone's at the water cooler behind your cubicle, blathering on about Tuscany and Provence and some insolent ass pipes up to ask your plans?

Wouldn't it be wonderful to swivel around, look this fellow in the eye and say, "Actually, this year, like every year, I'm sending my Vacation Robot to Paris. It is the city of love, and he never tires of it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do."

And do I ever! The prototype staggers around bumping into things, and has a fixed, expressionless gaze that may unnerve people in unsophisticated parts of the world. On the plus side, it is indefatigably curious and has a cast-iron stomach for local cuisine. It would never roll over in its hotel bed and growl, "You know what, who gives a damn about seeing a Frankish castle!" Future versions of Vacation Robot will take and upload pictures, like the Mars probe, so you can boast about your holiday in real-time to cubicle-mates.

What the hell — in honor of Elon Musk, I'll make this open source. Underlings of the world unite, and get tinkering! Start by fixing this blasted zombie walk. Then the thing about photos in real time. Take care of the details, so I can get back to the big think. Meanwhile I'm giving my patent lawyer the day off, a day of freedom if you will, not that he'll have the faintest idea what to do with it.

Curtis Brown is a writer based in Montreal. His work has appeared in Bidoun and the Beirut Daily Star.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.