Back in my day, high school was called that for a reason. We blazed a lot of viscid bud dawdling through The Baden Powell Memorial Wind Garden and Shrike Reserve on our way to Wednesday afternoon’s squash elective. We’d go in one side of ol’ BP’s dank grove all skippety and hormonally awkward and come out the other end malodorously toasted and sauntering like junior Lebowskis. As word spread that Brett McFarlane was secretly taxing his dad’s wicked hydro and skinning up midweek on the way to the leisure centre, there was a veritable storm surge of terry toweling headbands and Dunlop Volleys coursing through the park. Our physical education teacher was thrilled with the ever-increasing turnout, but visibly crestfallen at our lacklustre form on court. As hungry as a plague of zombie teen locusts we’d swarm the coin-op vending machines after the water ran out in the showers and ransack them of everything except White Knights. The “Mighty Mint Chew” was just too minty and too chewy for us shiftless tokers.
It was around this time that the first ever pocket calculators were allowed in our school, maybe because someone thought our weedy synapses were baked to cinders and we needed all the help we could get, or maybe it was just the future knocking on our slide rules. It seems funny to think of it now, when every first world child demands a laptop on their desk, and every student in CharmingVille is wishing “all nob nob fri gud 9” on their Galaxy Notes. Calculators ain’t nothing in this day and age. But in the era of Star Wars and Close Encounters and electric can openers, these newfangled machines turned parent-teacher evenings into ferocious disputations. Our groovy young science educator, Mr. Graham, who let us call him Bob and had a puka shell choker, was on the side of the grey plastic number crunchers for which we’d all paid a whopping 10 bucks. On the other side was Francine Weglarz, Boyco “The Zit” Weglarz’s mum. Boyco was state accordion champion. His mother was a bit mental and swallowed medication thrice daily. “How will our kids ever learn anything if they have machines to do it for them?” She’d rant, quite presciently as it turns out. And after a few sherries, contraindicated for her brain pills, “The robots are coming, mark my words. Remember 1984”.
Well, Mrs. Weglarz, you might have been clinically insane, but you were on the money. The machines are rising faster than you can say “artificial intelligence” and they’re attacking us in our very own homes.
Alarmingly, there are now TVs available, right here in CharmingVille, which listen to your most intimate conversations and pass on secret personal information to the fridge, or the toaster, or whatever. Are we just one step closer to Francine Weglarz’s domestic dystopia? After marital imperatives and necessary ablutions, being sat in front of the telly is my most private and intimate me-time. I hate to think the 40-inch box on my wall is passing judgment as I’m rocking my barely-there tropical onesies, tweezing in-growns and taunting the pet, for example.
It may be all that weed I smoked in the ‘70s, or the dypso tinfoil hatters down Walkabout may actually be right for once. But this creepy internet of things has finally hit my adopted, analogue hometown – the one with all the people and the noise and the stink that makes it soulful and human and unexpectedly fun. Sunday afternoon date-strolls through Sunsimexco or Nojima will never be the same. Those rice cookers are vicious fuckers when riled.
We’re still ahead of the curve when it comes to Personal Transportation Pods. Heathrow spent 40 million dollars on a fleet of eerily vacant capsules that take you short distances and comfortably seat four. Okay, so our versions run on stinking fossil fuels and have no idea where they’re going, but what do you expect for two bucks – it’s a small price to pay to keep our human primacy intact.
But if last week’s news is anything to go by, the end is nigh. A Korean woman got her hair sucked off by her robot vacuum cleaner. It mistook her for a dust kitty while she was napping on the shag pile – what she was doing down there with her appliances powered up is a mystery to us all. Perhaps there was some sweet Seoul skunk involved just prior. She survived the homebot’s overzealous restyle, but not before someone in emergency services posted an ignominious shot of her, face down with the droid mounting her crowning glory all over the internet. Machines – 2, humanity – 0.