Blog 3867 – 06.24.2026

I Am Not A Robot

Technology always promises to make our lives easier, to free us from time consuming tasks, to make our lives less complicated, but has it really? I can still recall when computers promised us paper free lives and the boxes and boxes filled with reams and reams of green lined computer paper reports that resulted. Less indeed turned out to be more. Today’s picture quote is at the same time laughable and yet profoundly and disturbingly ironic.

Technology has indeed removed many of the mundane tasks that we used to have to do, but at the same time it has left us many more complicated and time consuming tasks that we must complete and perfectly just to sign on to a computer, cell phone, or streaming app.

Technology to use a couple of old cliches is “a no sum game” and “a one step forward two steps backward” proposition. Cell phones promise better, faster, more personal communication and instead have us all glued to those tiny screens and typing brief messages with acronyms and emojis to one another to avoid the interruption of true personal connection or conversations. We have allowed emailing and texting, both far less precise and more easily misunderstood modes of communication to replace eye to eye and voice to voice communications. We are little by little losing our ability to speak and with the advent of AI may also be surrendering our ability to think and to write for ourselves as well.

I recently mentioned a Bruce Willis movie that predicted a future where everyone would just lay around with headsets on living vicariously through avatars in a virtual world. Social Media promised us connectivity with family and friends and instead further alienated and divided us to the point where the worlds richest man and owner of one of those social media outlets is warning us of the danger of empathy and compassion for others as if those were weaknesses and not strengths.

Why even lawyers, the most despised and denigrated of professions, perhaps even held in less esteem than the oldest profession, are expected and required to do a small percentage of “pro bono” cases out of the goodness of their hearts.

Will we allow technology to make us robots? Will AI be the end of us as a species? We have in our climb to the top of the food chain become the chief predator on the planet will we the masters allow our own creation to replace us? I hope not. Use your voice, be heard, use your mind, think for yourself. Turn off the screens for a few minutes, a few hours, and enjoy this big beautiful ball spinning through space home of a special race, the human race.

Say it with me now, “I am not a robot!”

Your friend and fellow traveler through time and space,

David James White