ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-11-25)
In case you missed it, a Russian android powered by AI was recently unveiled at a tech symposium in Moscow. The robot took a few steps, pitched forward, and then face-planted onto the floor, whereupon it busted into several pieces, as his stunned handlers struggled to whisk the abashed assemblage of bedraggled bolts off the stage. If it had had a life-alert device, it would have pushed the button and yelled into it, "I've discombobulated, and I can't combobulate!" It looked disturbingly like the field sobriety test of someone about to score a .19 blood-alcohol level on the breathalyzer, on his way to getting his license suspended for 90 days. Or so I'd imagine.
How did we get here? And here is where we are, trying desperately to remove any small measure of physical exertion from our lives, while at the same time paying $200 a month for a gym membership to put it all back. Did it all start with my Dad, who, as us kids tried to surreptitiously creep past his open bedroom door, summoned us over to the TV to change the channel as he weighed the merits and entertainment value of each program? Thank goodness we didn't have 370 channels back then. From the first year that I was tall enough to reach the television tuner to the day an automated device was invented, I was a human remote control.
Probably our fascination with automation started even before that, maybe with the invention of the telephone. In order to hold a conversation you used to have to mount up and find someone's house so you could let them know how stupid they were to build one so far away. Leading to some disparaging remarks about you, not to mention the horse you rode in on. But once the telephone came into widespread use, you could simply call them up and give them a piece of your mind. And this time, your Mom wouldn't see the faces you were making as she yelled back at you.
Maybe it was the automobile. Once a Mustang was invented that had more horsepower than an actual mustang AND you could put the top up when it rained, progress had won. Was it the washing machine? Now you don't have to wash your clothes in the cold river against the rocks, and the rocks don't have to complain that, couldn't you ONCE not wear white to an Italian restaurant? Maybe it was the record player. In the days before its invention, if you wanted to hear a particular song you'd have to invite the band over to play it for you. And once they were finally gone, your liquor cabinet was sparser and the drummer had left with your wife.
The Japanese are always trying to invent a robot that can serve as a companion, thinking, erroneously, that it might be better company. But Artificial Intelligence is making robots act more like humans every day, and that means that very soon they'll be annoying and impossible to live with. They've already invented a female android named Ann, so real-looking that it prompted me to say in wonder, "couldn't they have used a smaller nose?" It holds the promise of making being in a relationship much easier, using advanced science such as speech recognition and realistic materials that allow its facial expressions to better mimic being exasperated with men because they didn't first write down the address before getting in the car.
The more AI is used in ways it never has been before, the more opportunities arise for it to fail. An article I read in the Times said that an editor for the New England Journal of Medicine sent an author a letter it had received before publishing it, which had disagreed with his study's findings. It referred to a different paper, which happened to have been written by the same scientist, but cited the article's conclusions erroneously. When it happened again, it became apparent that scientists wishing to be recognized in multiple fields were using AI to provide research that would normally take weeks, in order to get letters into the Journal. The fact that it got findings wrong was an unfortunate side effect. It made me want to write a letter to the Times stating how misleading this article was, and use AI to write it, since I couldn't figure out myself how it was misleading. I guess that's why when I used to write letters to the editor, they never wrote me back.
It seems we'll all have to think long and hard about what AI's place in the world should be, before it convincingly proves that we're longer necessary. Maybe one day after I'm gone, I could be replaced by a robot that complains about its knee, leaves remnants of unfinished projects all over the house and completes your sentences for you in a way that you never pictured when you started them. I picture it in a platonic yet unnaturally rewarding relationship with Ann the android, in which they spend romantic evenings picking up small objects in front of each other and boasting about how easily they do it, escalate their arguments to physical violence but brag that it didn't hurt, and play each other to a total of 572,000 stalemates in chess. And THAT, my friends, is progress....
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