Oh no! Robots stealing American jobs? Cry me a river.

I am utterly stunned by the number of blithering idiots who come up to me and tell me I am hurting people by taking their jobs by working on robots.

Lets be perfectly clear here: the purpose of technology is to make human life easier. Normally that is a celebrated thing: either we have to do less labor, or we will undo some mess we made, or we will simply have the same amount of labor but it won't be as tiring. All throughout history this has been true: the wheel, the plow...all of these things changed the way humanity lived in a tremendous and drastic scale. All these things are celebrated cornerstones without which our society would never have become what it is.

Think back. At the time, what did people do before the automatic printing press? They copied books by hand. Monks in monasteries carefully painstakingly copied books word for word. When the printing press arrived, what happened to them? They were all replaced by the printing press and found other tasks to do. This was not considered some great tragedy, this was considered one of the greatest societal changes in human history: now material to read was accessible to people who were not the richest of the rich.

Lets try again: the cotton gin. You remember that right? It was on a page with the name "Eli Whitney" in your middle school US History textbook. This machine separated usable cotton from the junk it grew in, a process that was previously done by hand. This was considered a tremendous improvement as one person could now do the work of many with this machine. Uh-oh, doesn't that mean you are "destroying jobs?" Sure does, but people adapted! The Cotton Gin has gone down in history as an important contributor to the American Industrial Revolution and a major shaping factor on the Southern economy at that time.

Lets try again: how about the automatic weaving machines that revolutionized the textile industry? How about the dynamite and the (even more) backbreaking work involved in mining prior to its introduction? The plow? The wheel? All of these things decreased the need for simple manual labor and meant that one person could do more in a given span of time. The completely natural effect of one person being able to do the work of many is for the one person to continue doing that job and for the many to go find new jobs. What the hell would have happened if we had tried to restrict the development of the plow to preserve the jobs of the people who dug the holes for the crops by hand? No, that concept is laughable. It is normal for technology to replace our nastiest jobs: that is what it is there for. The only question is, how do we manage to adapt?

Historically, as the complication of the technology around us increases the length of time we spend in the education system increases. In the late 1800's graduating highschool was a rare feat. By the late 1900's it was a bare minimum. This is because the modern world requires a higher level of literacy and more math skills than simply counting cattle.

So here is my big question: what about this multi-thousand year trend changes just because you start calling your machines robots? What changes when its a "dark factory" instead of an automated threshing machine, or an automated welder, or any other of a million other devices which have reduced labor by the same scale as any of those devices would?

The answer is that nothing has changed. Last turn of the century it was the industrial revolution and, with any luck it will be the robotic revolution this time around. Last time around nobody screamed "but what will all the town blacksmiths do?" and tried to stop things, and it is only a sign of how completely spoiled our generation is that we even consider doing such a thing today. Lets face it: even if I am wrong and it isn't moral, the development of technology is going to happen either way because its flatly profitable.

If you work in a factory (or any number of other places), your job has a very good chance of being replaced in the next 100 years. This is a natural and positive thing because, if history serves as any example, if your children study hard in school they will probably have far easier jobs than yours when they grow up. The question we ought to be asking is not "how can we stop or weather this revolution" but "what is wrong with our education system that we may not be able to keep up with our own inventions."

The fear and anger people feel is misdirected. The "robots" that are coming to take the jobs you use to do are merely messengers of the fact that technology is continuing to develop and that, in fact, nothing has changed at all.

...In Sin and Misery

I never cared much for the oldies station.

Far prior to the hubcapless wonder of my high school years our family made its way about in a beaten up blue ford station wagon. It was shorter, and I was shorter, and the combination of these facts meant that looking out the window wasn't a terribly efficient pastime unless I wanted to view the slightly fuzzy blue interior material which covered most of the door and the knobby top of the door lock which broke the otherwise soft level horizon of the interior material.

"There is, a house, in New Orleans..."

The man in the radio howled the next line and I jumped at the noise. My mother glanced over at me and laughed a little.

"You don't know this song, Pika?"

I shook my head.

"Its a very old and famous song, normally sung by a woman."

"And its been, the ruin, of many a poor boy. Dear God, I know, I'm one."

"What's it about?" I asked.

"A brothel."

My pause indicated my vocab didn't quite cover that word.

"A whorehouse," my mother said.

"Oh," I said. I was aware of the world's oldest profession at that age but, being about nine, I didn't really understand the emotional ramifications of it.

"Its a very sad and desperate thing," my mother said. She seemed a little agitated at the whole conversation.

I was completely in my own world staring out the window listening, "I like it."

"What?"

"I like this song."

"Oh," she responded, slightly relieved.

"I like the way it sounds, I like this band."

"The Animals? They are not very good. Nobody liked them when I was your age. They are fake, put together by a business. They couldn't even play their own instruments when they started."

There did not seem to be very much to say to that. It wasn't until many years later that I would find any other version of the Animal's history but at the time I was too busy enjoying the music to question further. I wanted to sing along, but I didn't know the words. There was something about the utter misery and desperation in the singer's voice which held my attention, something beautiful. That same something remained with me for days after as I hummed the tune, slightly nervous to sing it aloud for fear I'd upset mom with the "brothel" talk.

***

Somewhere in the Mojave desert the moon watched a beat up little Ford Tarus of college students slide along the highway.

We have a rule that you know you are in the middle of nowhere when all you can get on the radio are Jesus stations and music featuring accordions. I was spinning through stations in the passenger seat at two in the morning when I came across the beginning chord progression.

"Ohmygod," I slurred the words together in my haste, cranking the volume, "I haven't heard this in forever."

"There is, a house, in New Orleans, they call the rising sun..."

"Heard what?" Drummer looked at me quizzically from the passenger seat.

I didn't respond, head tipped back, as I howled the next line with the radio, "And its been, the ruin, of many a poor boy...dear God, I know, I'm one..."

I haven't the least idea how bad or good it sounded, but Drummer kept glancing at me sideways as we tore through the night. From time to time I'd catch him humming along bits of it with me. I think he would have sang aloud with me, but he did not know the words. The song eventually died and there car was filled with a content silence.

"What's that song?"

"House of the Rising Sun, its really old but pretty famous. This cover is by The Animals."

"Alright," he smiled, and his voice trailed off something about "when we get home." I found myself humming snatches of it for the next few weeks after hearing it, and it seemed to make him smile.

***

I hadn't talked to Tina in ages but somehow when I randomly IMed her we wound up in the most bizarre and complicated conversation I think we had ever had.

"...and so..." I said, "I started the blog to practice because I can't write well enough yet to finish the book..."

"You're writing right now?"

"Well yes, but I'm not pleased with the first draft I wrote for a chunk of the book. None of the characters are believable. Nobody really talks like the Gillmore Girls, its alienating when everybody in a book does."

"I don't know," she replied, naming a new TV show she was actively watching which I had not heard of and now can't remember the name of, "All the characters in that are sexy and clever, by your standards they should be very alienating. However, they are still very real because, for whatever reason, they are all very messed up and miserable inside, even though on the outside it looks like they shouldn't be."

"So you think everybody can identify with these people because we're all miserable inside too?"

"That's harsher than I would say it, but yes."

***

I've gone through the lyrics several times now in search of the whorehouse that upset my mother all those years ago. I understand that sometimes other people have found reference to it but that others never do. I don't think the lyrics are what are important to it though: not now, not however many hundreds of years ago it was first sung, and not in 1964 when it brought a little band from obscurity into wild fame. Its the empathy for the singer.

Oh Mother, tell your children,
Not to do what I have done.
Don't spend your lives in, sin and misery,
In the house, of the rising sun.

	The Animals - The House Of The Rising Sun
	Found at skreemr.com

Living Hawaiian

Microwave Directions:
Remove frozen burrito from individual packaging and wrap burrito in paper towel. Microwave on high for 1:20 minutes or until cheese is melted.

I stood there with the frozen food item turning it over in my hands. The shell seemed steamed completely shut and impossible to pry open without cracking it.

Huh, I wonder, If the cheese is inside, how would I even know?

Pulling the door of the freezer which wasn't mine open again I paw through the unfamiliar contents before throwing them all in a bag and loading them on my makeshift cart. Then I go for the fridge and start on the pantry shelves.

The sun was warm on my back and on the underside of my feet via the black tar that paves the road from delta to what was alpha.

***

"You guys should get on our meal plan next cycle."

"Nah," Bubbles says, "we have Costco frozen pizzas, we're set."

"That...sucks...to eat all the time."

"Nah," the Hawaiian replies, "We have ramen too, gotta eat your saiman!" He throws his thumb and pinky out and flicks his wrist back and forth in a shaka. I still find it odd to watch them do that, but of late they have adopted doing this to emphasize that whatever it is that I don't understand is just how they like things, that its something the "mainlanders" aren't going to get.

***

"There's no room in my freezer," Supplies lamented.

"There's only five people in Delta... Alpha and Gamma have seven and they seem to be ok.

"Yeah well we have all three Hawaiians and they all just went to costco. They are currently eating the 6th gallon of ice cream and rebagging ice cream sandwiches because only the first 5 gallons will fit in the freezer."

"Oh come on, I'm sure its not that--"

"And the corn dogs and the frozen pizzas and...I'm afraid to open the door because every time I do shit falls out."

"Ah," I said, "well, maybe Beta has a little room for you."

***

Even walking out of the airport I felt like I was in a totally different world. Portions of the airport did not even have walls, but the temperature was comfortable enough that I had not noticed this until I noticed a palm branch which had strayed, still on the living tree, into the corridor of the airport.

The McDonalds sold spam with breakfast. They also sold it with lunch, and even disguised as little sushi-like rolls bound up with a scrap of seaweed to a rectangular prism of sticky rice.

My mother had heard me mention that many of the rich girls from school went to Hawaii. I never dreamed to ask to go, but as we walked off the plane my mother said, as if already mid-conversation, "and now you can tell them you have been to Hawaii too."

We stayed in a small hotel in a little town near Hilo. The only comparison I could draw for the hotel was not until many years later when I saw Circus Circus in Las Vegas. Once it was pompus and gaudy by the day's standards, but time had given it a healthy dose of humility. Compared to what else existed you could even call it modest.

I spent my days mostly wandering the local town. Everything was slow and friendly, but I could not quantify it and so, being a geek, I turned to numbers: gas was expensive. Fresh food of all varieties was expensive. The frozen food section of grocery stores was tremendous.

"Everything they have here must be flown in," my mother said.

I remember standing in an isle with my hands on the glass of the freezer door, looking upon the rows on rows of cheerfully labled plastic bags of flash frozen, pre-cooked, make in 10-minutes everything. Really, a person could probably live off what could be found here. Somehow, what I really wanted at that moment was a fresh fruit salad.

I wonder if this is how we will all live in 100 years.

***

Two of the Hawaiians were sitting in the kitchen of Delta, obscured by the kitchen table.

"Hey," I said, "Sys's dad brought probably 4 gallons of ice cream to beta."

Kelson held up a spoon in one hand and a tub of ice cream in another, "Nah, we're trying to finish our own before move out."

Probably half an hour later Kelson is sitting with Gadget, Michelle, and Supplies playing Set. He's got a new quart of ice cream in his hands and a spoon.

The oddest part about Kelson and Bubbles is they both are rather thin and fit.

"If I ate that way," Gadget said, "I'd die of diabetes at 500 pounds."

***

The pile up of abandoned food in Alpha is tremendous. I must have at least 7 jars of salsa in varying degrees of spiciness. Ketchup and mayo follow in close pursuit in popularity. All of these people gave to me when they moved out instead of putting them into the trash can.

Most people managed to finish their fresh fruit and sandwich meats. All that's really left are the things they bought in bulk: cereal and frozen foods. I used up my own fresh supplies some time ago, and buying food when you already have some here for free seems wasteful.

Cereal for breakfast, frozen potstickers for lunch. To change it up I added a pot of rice to the entre of potstickers for dinner.

"Heh," I laughed over AIM to Supplies, "I'm living Hawaiian now!"

"Don't be stupid," he said, "if you were going to do that you'd need to have a flash frozen breakfast too."

Con Man

The white rails of my bunk bed are cool to the touch. My palms are pressed against them, laying on my back staring at the ceiling not four feet above my head.

"Get up," my mother said. A pair of khaki pants I normally only wore for photos and formal occasions flew over the edge of the bunk and landed with one leg across my face. A nice shirt similar to the ones I had seen my high school peers wearing followed. Previously I didn't think I owned such an item.

"Put these on," my mother said.

"Wha..." I said, picking up the shirt by the collar in one hand and holding it in front of me gingerly as if it might be roadkill, "what's going on, are we going someplace special?"

"We're going to a neurologist," my mother responded, flicking on the lights and causing me to cease to regard the shirt as wholly undesirable, as it now made an excellent cover for my face to block the light. It still smelled like a store.

"So, why do I have to wear these?" I asked, but my mother was already gone.

I repeated the question shortly after as I wandered out the front door and pulled open the dented hubcapless minivan which was my family's primary mode of transportation during highschool.

My mother put the car into reverse and looked backwards between the seats to back out of the driveway, "We have to convince the neurologist to take your case, he's very important and doesn't have to. I want him to like you, so you have to remind him of his daughter. Better yet, if his daughter is a brat, I want you to remind him of who he wishes his daughter was."

"And this?" I pulled at the back of my shirt so it came around to let me see the tag. It read 'Abercronbie and Fitch.'

"Neurologists are rich."

There was a long pause interrupted only by the jostling of the car over the bumps in the road. My mother broke it, "What shoes are you wearing today, Pika?"

"My sneakers," I replied, fairly aware that if that question was asked this answer wouldn't be right. It hadn't seemed too unrealistic at the time, I had seen girls who wore shirts like this also wear sneakers.

"You're incorrigible," my mother sighed, reaching into the back seat to grab another pair of shoes and put them on my lap, "put these on."

The neurologist was definitely of my mother's generation. I sat with my hands folded and ankles crossed that day on the exam table. I spoke when spoken to, and I smiled the whole time. This was not the model of a modern teenager, but this was something that looked like a modern teenager and acted exactly the way the baby-boomers had been expected to behave as children.

"Seems a shame," the neurologist said, "you seem to be a nice girl. Lets see what we can can do to help you." He reached out and patted me on the head and smiled. I obediently widened my smile and looked up at him with big eyes.

***

The eight and a half mile trail Panorama trail had taken considerably more time than we had anticipated between the elevation changes and the fact that we weren't use to the elevation yet. Dusk was falling and we had four miles to go with an elevation change of 3,200 feet to get back to the cars. Pacem and had run ahead and tried to hitchhike a ride while Joker did the same thing nearby, both to no avail. The whole time the sky was getting darker.

"We're going it anyway," Bobby said. Five of them piled into a shuttle bus and I turned to follow them.

"Pika, stay here," Joker said. I scowled at him. Arguably I was not as strong as the boys and might slow them down, but any reminder of this made me more than slightly cranky. If an adventure was afoot, I sure as hell wanted to be part of it.

I watched the doors shut and the bus pull away.

"FUCK!"

Bane tried not to roll his eyes, "Calm down Pika."

"It doesn't bother you, to be left behind, when they are going to have an adventure?"

"If by adventure you mean pretty shitty time," Duckling replied. The words were not meant to be a challenge or overly sarcastic, he simply stated his opinion calmly through half-open eyes.

"Lets try another path...Bane, you have a spare set of keys?"

"In my glove compartment."

"Lets break into your car."

The four of us were on the next shuttle. In my hand I held a stray bobby pin I had picked up from the platform. Now all I had to do was convince somebody to drive us an hour out to the car.

Two grimy men were sitting in the seat of the shuttle in front of us wearing backpacking gear. They were in their late 50s and chatted idly with one another. I could see the wedding band on the one sitting to the right as he braced himself against a pole. Men that age either have children or adopt strange people often treating them like children.

"Ok," I said as if already mid conversation with Bane, "we're going to be alright, all we have to do is get to the car. I still can't believe this happened..."

It wasn't terribly long before the two men were sucked into our imaginary conversation and it wasn't too long after that before they made arrangements to take us to our destination.

"Call Bobby," I told Bane, "bring them all back."

Its fully dark two hours later. Pacem and Joker are up with our new friend Bob getting the car and the rest of the group is waiting by a bus stop. Drummer walks back with a bag full of s'mores in his arms. I'm carrying beer for our new friend Bob and a chocolate bar.

"I thought you didn't have your ID," Bobby looked up and asked as we approached the group.

"I don't," I replied, shoving a flashlight and some water bottles aside to find a place to sit.

"And they didn't card you?"

"No," Drummer said, "they did. They gave it to her anyway."

Bobby shook his head, "How the fuck do you do this?"

Getting Sparse

I can feel the echoes of my steps in my ankles and knees as I walk across the tremendous metal pipe at least 12 feet in diameter. I'm crouched low on it, cowarded by the sheer drop immanent on either side, picking my way slowly across to the muffled clang clang of my sneakers causing echoes through its surface. The world below me is blurred by soft yellowed street lamps and the sky arches above me, alive with the tiny pinpricks of stars.

I don't know why the railings are even here. Reaching out to grab one I can shake it without even committing my weight to it, and somebody of my height doesn't even have that much weight to offer even if I wanted to.

"Watch out," he called, "it gets a little sparse out here."

Down and around and to another service ladder. The first few steps are the only ones you are moving at all. After that you might just be making motions in place as the earth drops away and the top of the building still seems hopelessly far away.

I'm sweating slightly at the switch. The two ladders are relatively well aligned but the second one arches over the dome and the very bottom ledge of it swings free. I can feel it flex under my weight and bits of old peeled paint flake off in my palms as I continue to move forward. The rungs arch over so I am climbing nearly horizontally at the top but I still cling to the bars hopelessly at the sight of the multiple story drop on each side.

Two more friends are waiting at the top. They nod to me and one of them points out to the horizon.

"Hell of a view," he says.

I swear even the air tastes better up here.

Why did I ever give this up?

My second friend sits quietly awestruck, hands wrapped around his knees curled up looking out. I am glad to share this experience with him, and yet, I know that prior to meeting me he never would have dreamed of doing this. This is, by most standards, a grossly unsafe nocturnal activity, not to mention strongly outside the taste of the cops...and yet, it is one of my greatest joys in life. Who am I to take a friend out of our statistically derived perfect lifestyle of acceptable safety threshholds?

Once upon a time we roamed the land as nomads. We hunted our food with spears, we lived on nothing, and yet we lived through it. More than that, we, as a species, thrived. Today we're raised in a society where your heart rate rises and your palms sweat a mere 3 stories up on a safety ladder on the exposed side of a building. Is this right? Am I corrupting my younger friend or freeing him?

The inside of the tank is made of beautifully welded sheets of steel. Everything is fascinating in this sphere: my voice, my footsteps, even simple laughter is amplified and echoed back to me until it sounds twisted and nearly evil. One friend whistles until the shell picks up the sound and hums it back to us, and I hold a single note and listen to it do the same. The whole group is amused by making simple clicking sounds and saying short words.

Exploration and fear leave a sense of wonder in us which is all too often forgotten. Our world is beautiful and fascinating, but sometimes you have to take yourself out of context a little to see it.

Memorize

"17 squared is...?"

"Erm..."

"Oh come on Pika, you need to know this."

"Not with a calculator..."

"You should really know this, its not like you will carry a calculator everywhere with you during life."

I have a calculator in my backpack, but normally I just use the one integrated into my cell phone. I carry this phone everywhere, and I have not seen a phone in the last 5 years which doesn't have such a calculator on it.

***

They call us the search engine generation. We are storing less and less knowledge in our minds and have come more and more to rely on our ability to rapidly locate data than our actual knowledge of it.

***

I'm thumbing through yet another applicant's exam, first for the easy short answer questions before I even begin working out if the code they wrote is correct.

"What pins," the exam asks, "do you need to drive in order to put a number on the four 7 segment displays on the Nexys II by Digilent?"

"I have no experience with this display," the response reads.

Its a shame we don't have paper applications anymore. Crumpling up the application and trying for a two point swoosh into the trash can might be strangely gratifying. That particular board was chosen to be obscure, the question was meant to be one of character. If the applicant so much as pulled up an image of that board on Google he would find the numbers he requires have physically been printed on the front of the board. I find the concept that you would expect anybody to have memorized everything he needs laughable.

***

"Did you know," the priest asked, "that when paper first became widely available in ancient Greece that the older philosophers had a fit about it?"

The art of being in high school seemed to lie in pretending very hard that nothing a teacher could ever say would be interesting. After pause sufficient enough to indicate that he didn't plan to continue until we responded I shook my head.

"Yes," he said, "they thought that students would never learn anything because they could always just write it down instead."

***

"Your language skills are terrible, you'll never pass in any social context" my mother said, "you can not even recite poetry."

"Most people don't even read poetry anymore let alone memorize it..."

"This," she pointed to her bookshelf, "is what educated adults know. Some day you will grow out of this childish phase and want to pass as an educated adult you know."

Somehow I remember feeling distinctly like I wouldn't.

My mother was irritated and persistent, "Recite! Poe!"

"Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though,"

"Its that's Frost. I said Poe."

***

Meet Drummer. Drummer scored the best of the applicants on his technical exam, attends an ivy league school, and currently has an internship with a fairly respectable federal agency. He, in a similar previous episode of distraction, once named all 151 original Pokemon on a sheet of paper. He's a phenomenal coder and I have no issue with his performance or raw intellect.

"Could you name all 50 states?" he asked me.

I laughed, thinking he was being funny.

"No, seriously, if we printed blank maps of the United States do you think you could put the right titles in all the states?"

"Yeah, and I am sure you could too."

"I'm not..."

"Lets try."

Sys was up for the challenge too. The states were easy enough, and with enough discussion we got all of the capitols (although Sys contributed significantly more to that list than I did.) Drummer, partially from his mind and partially from random eavesdropping exclamations such as "oh yeah, Kentucky is a state!" managed to fill in most of his map.

Here's a photograph we took of it. It is worth noting that the two states Drummer has lived in are Georgia and New York.

After a merry round of below the belt comments about Drummer's education and general intellect he started looking slightly sad.

"How did you even pass 5th grade?" I asked.

"Well," he shrugged, "I knew it all then...I guess I just...forgot."

"Forgot?"

"Some of these states...aren't even important," he says.

"Of course they are all important!" I snap, "this is the country we live in. You should know at least all the parts of it..."

"Actually, I think its defensible," Gadget joined in, "I mean...he can always go look up the gory details if he wants them right?"

"No," I insist, "there is a basic minimum that you need to not look like an idiot in any historical or political discussion. This is fundamental knowledge for an educated adult."

Educated adult? I am slightly creeped out to hear my mother's words come out of my mouth. Is my insistance on what I consider basic geography as outrageous as I found her insistence on poetry? It might be possible. If the ancient greeks thought paper was a scandal, my parent's generation loathed handheld calculators in favor of Poe, might it be possible that in a few years memorization tasks like basic geography be rendered obsolete? Throughout the whole progression of human history we have slowly kept less and less in our heads and more and more in our tools. Where do we, as a generation, draw our lines of dependency?

***

I'm walking across the lab. Drummer's on break at his desk, sandwich in hand, staring at his screen.

"Penny for your thoughts," I say.

Drummer takes another bite of his sandwich and tilts the monitor so I can see it with his other hand. Across the whole screen I can see a map of the United States, completely labeled this time.

"Ahh, you're studying?" I asked.

Drummer nodded.

It warms my little heart.