What Do We Think of This? (a New Series)

To my astonishment, this orange contraption appeared in a quiet street in Bristol the other day.

What I think about it:

Not very long ago (possibly during COVID lockdowns?) I wasn’t overjoyed when masses of under-paid men* began hurtling about the streets and pavements of European cities on bikes and scooters, carrying soft cube-shaped* boxes on their backs - but this new wheeled object is not an improvement. At least there was human interchange with the cube-people - and you could give the poor fellows a decent tip when they turned up at your door.

This machine, which presumably seeks to replace them, must have used up masses of energy in its construction (in China, I’m guessing, therefore possibly its construction was carried out by Uighur slaves). It probably also caused masses of soil and water pollution while being made - and almost certainly continues to burn up fuel of some kind in its operation as well (a lot of energy is needed for a machine to be able to think well enough to go where it’s sent, without a human to drive it). And I bet it is not free of rare earths, with all that they entail (child labour springs to mind, plus the scarcity their name implies).

The suggestion painted along the box’s metal side is that we should “just eat” and the plan is to remove obstacles to doing that. In an age of over-eating, is this not unwise? Even if it isn’t, is the pleasure of eating food delivered in plastic boxes really greater than the pleasure of food made at home, having exercised the uniquely human ability to plan and prepare a meal, (not to mention the business of shopping for the ingredients, with all the small experiences you have along the way - think Vonnegut’s post office outing).

This glorified wheelie-bin cuts out one more person-to-person interaction in daily life. Its introduction is fuelled by greed - not just the greed for food, but the greed for profit that is also behind the drive to get rid of people on tills in supermarkets, enlisting customers to do that work themselves, and the removal of staff to take your money at boomgates on European motorways, which relies on the computerised system working smoothly (you should see the chaos when it doesn’t) and the disappearance of bank branches where you can talk to a human being - and so on and so on.

People somewhere far away, whose names we may never know and whose faces will almost certainly never be revealed to us, are dedicating their energies to devising ways to make more and more money by depriving others of work and the chance to feel worthwhile and part of a community. I hate it.

What do you think?

*interestingly, there does seem to be a females-need-not-apply element to this new, (potentially fleeting) field of employment

*if we can say ‘tubular’, why can we not say ‘cubular’?

Buzz Off

I read the other day that the word "robot" came into English from the Czech for "work", which really anyone with half a brain who's studied a Slavic language ought to have guessed years ago. That group does not include me, I'm sorry to say and, given that I have studied a Slavic language, there is only one conclusion to be drawn, I guess.

Instead of drawing that conclusion, however, I prefer to believe that my brain, all half of it, has been preoccupied with more important things. Rather than worrying about the provenance of the word "robot", I've been busy with worrying about the automatisation - or robotification, if you like - of just about every form of employment once undertaken by  those of us who are not geniuses.

I admit to a certain level of hypocrisy in this matter. The truth is I have been known to find myself worrying about the loss of unskilled jobs because of automation, while simultaneously enjoying the simple autonomy of using the automated cash registers now available at so many supermarkets. Mind you, my worries about the future of  unskilled employment at these moments are usually interrupted by exclamations from the automated machine I'm using. These generally lead to idle speculation about whether a chick lit novel called Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area about a woman who gets pregnant without meaning to would be a success.

But I digress. While replacing people with things is clearly going to have some pretty horrendous consequences in the job market, the thing about the process that bothers me most is the way in which it is whittling away the opportunities for idle chat between strangers. As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out beautifully, the most pleasant moments in life are often to be found in the inconsequential interchanges we have while faffing about doing apparently unexciting chores.

I was reminded of this just yesterday while staring out of my front window, (an activity I am quite fond of, especially when the alternative is persuading myself to write a chick lit novel called Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area about a woman who becomes pregnant without meaning to [no, I'm not serious and yes, do by all means take the idea if it appeals to you]). On the opposite side of the street there was a man cutting his hedge. To my amazement, this man was using a pair of hand-held clippers.

Amazement might seem a strong reaction to this sight, but, until now I'd understood that where gardening and Belgium intersect automation is the name of the game. Even though every house on our  street has hedge plants and other scraps of gardeny type stuff, I have never once before  - in almost a year of living here - seen anyone deploying a garden tool that doesn't have a motor. The gardening world of Brussels appeared until yesterday to consist exclusively of men driving around town with trailers full of noisy machines. In return for hefty payments, they would hurtle toward your dwelling, eager to deploy their chainsaws and leaf blowers and buzzcutters and handheld missile launchers and - well, perhaps not the latter, providing you pay your bills on time. As a result, the noise on the street is not deafening but it is often maddening.

But back to the point. There I was, at the window, staring in open surprise at this extraordinary being, a man who didn't seem to care about saving himself  labour, who didn't invest his masculinity in horsepower and loud sound, a man who preferred a slow, elegant approach, a man who valued the importance of artistry in his work. As I watched, I saw him clip for a bit; brush away what he'd clipped; lower his shears and stand back to get an idea of the effect he'd created; and then return to the task, refining what he'd done before. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He appeared to be taking pride in the process and in the result.

And even better still was what happened next. Along came one of the neighbours, returning home from a walk with her tubby labradors. She waved as she approached the man and then stopped and engaged him in conversation. He clipped and talked, she watched and responded, he stood back and looked at the hedge, while answering something she'd asked him, she pointed out a bit he'd missed and agreed with his reply. He worked and they chatted - they did both things at the same time!

This was so civilised and pleasant. In the presence of the normal gardeners, the woman with the fat labradors would have been scuttling from the gate to the front door, desperate to escape the unpleasant buzzing.  There would have been no opportunity for conversation, no friendliness, no chance for one of the fat labradors to find a scrap of something that might be edible there in the gutter, no pointless easygoing interlude where for a moment both people had a sense of being connected.

What I saw there, between my neighbour and the pre-mechanised gardener was a small green leaf of community emerging.

But the men with the automated shears and leaf blowers will be back soon, ready to nip it in the bud.