January 18, 2022
Ohio. Clear skies with highs in the mid-thirties, sunset at 5:34pm, and it finally snowed last night. Not a lot of snow, but enough to soften the world a little. Enough to remember childhood winters and even recall a sense of wonder at all this strange material falling from the sky.
After admiring the snow, I navigated the rat’s nest of modern living. Caught in a reverse Voight-Kampff test, I spent nine minutes quarreling with a telephone robot who refused to deliver me to a human until I successfully answered its increasingly existential questions: Is there a disruption in your area? Are you experiencing technical difficulties? Is your connection intermittent?
As I waited to be connected, I caught a glimpse of a cold future, a binary world in which all of our services and transactions are brokered by robots—1 for yes, 2 for no—leaving no room for the grey zone of being human.
