I think there is a superficial line
between “us” and machines. I semi-consistently get accused of
being a robot because I understand people's lives and relationships
in terms considered cold, impartial, or somehow (given how deeply it
cuts) utterly misinformed. Maybe I can run with an explanation of
this robotic nature. Maybe I can explain that the picture is more
complex, and frankly more meaningful, than you have the capacity to
hear.
I’m not an advocate of circumstance.
I don’t want to “fall in love” with someone because we grew up
in the same place. I don’t want to “find myself surprisingly
agreeing with” someone because we both found an angst ridden
philosopher our freshman year of college. I don’t want to subject
someone to the whirlwind of my feelings. I don’t want to constrain
someone because I’m afraid they’ll leave me. I, in an
important sense concerning your personhood, personality, well-being,
and arbiter of your decisions, don’t want to be responsible for
making decisions for you. I don’t want to trap you or guilt you, or
exert a horribly conceived sense of power over you.
I just am.
Whether I’m happy or sad, that is up to me. Whether I choose to
find a way to swallow what I’m doing in life or not, again, up to
me. My decisions, as long as I’m going to claim responsibility for
them, I’m going to regard them as free, if only pragmatically.
“I” am not “us” and don’t burden you with my little
exploration of self, meaning, or place in the world. I think this is
a position of respect, understanding, and freedom. If I openly state
that I’m an ongoing puzzle to be put in relative space, far be it
for me to be the judgmental stopping point on what to say about who
you are.
And because it never gets old,
apparently as a robot, I’m interested in strings of data. I like to
let my brain process an input and see some kind of conclusion. Funny
thing about drawing conclusions, nobody likes it when you “doom
them to fail.” Now, I stress that I’m using their language, for
us robots merely see things as “necessary consequences.” You may
have guessed that we robots get the most flack when it comes to
talking about how people get along with one another. It gets extra
dramatic when they’re supposed to or have been “getting along”
for long periods of time. Proposing a more nuanced and specific
answer as to why that diverges from “because they love each other”
gets quite a load of shit dumped on a poor merely processing robot’s
head.
Now don’t go humanizing, this isn’t
a pity party. This is one in a string of ongoing explanations. I
understand this is the point to start touting a litany of feelings,
and they’ve been taken under administrative consideration.
A little about robots; it isn’t that
they don’t feel, it’s that they feel sparingly. And even when
those feelings kick in, they tend to be fleeting and not
overwhelmingly compelling. See, for robots, feelings inform. They’re
like a lick from an enthusiastic puppy; “Oh, that was sooo cute!
And a little wet lol” but it’s going to dry up and the dog will
shit on the rug. This doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the puppy
licks, but robot memories are designed to store the smell of puppy
shit. We understand the amount of work it takes to get that puppy to
a happy and healthy place for both parties.
A robot is only as good as in the
information available. My inputs come from hundreds of
self-descriptions describing a million different versions of
the same relationship! Even pointing this out to a fellow converser
is a robots folly. Why, however could a robot know MY LOVE?!
This seems to misunderstand a robot’s position. I have nothing
vested in whether you work or don’t, I’m merely stating the
experiential data and drawing an analogy to a seemingly similar
situation. Live long and prosper for all I care, but why not
contemplate the significance of your defensiveness?
I say loud and I say often how much I
don’t believe in love. For those of you who understand this is
almost my 300th blog on or referencing the topic, I’ll
save the rehashing why. Love, like all things in a robots mind, is
constrained by how useful it can be used to compute an outcome or
understand the data. Given enough conversation, explanation, and an
indefinitely growing list of the definitions of love, it does not
compute. However, all hope is not lost! Surely there is a positive
swing that can be described as to why people relate the way they do.
So then we can traverse into the hard,
pragmatic, and dare I claim “rational” world. With this
streamlined sensibility, we take people’s words for it; we apply
basic understandings of human psyches, and use some good old
fashioned plain speech. Here, people don’t want to be alone. In
this world, people are afraid of having nothing to show for their
lives. In this magical place, people go through experience after
experience and, if they're lucky, have lives play out like their
favorite television drama provided no one ended up dying. Love comes
as quick as you’re willing to say it. The “cutest” “smartest”
“most amazing” guy or girl in the world is a mere Facebook status
update and/or few years away from the last one.
Please note, simply being a pattern
does not mean I lament the pattern, or that it’s a bad pattern, or
that I don’t believe there is a large amount of genuine happiness
to be derived from said pattern. BUT IT’S A FUCKING PATTERN! It’s
this odd thrust of ego and hubris and self-importance that placates
common sense and historical perspective that just throws this humble
robot for a loop. If, and let me stress if, patterns can be, at least
semi-relied upon to predict the future, why not try to
live in that future and behave accordingly? Why not try to account
for all the things people would like to ignore or forget, and own
them now, get good at them now, and see what manifests from that?
Now, I understand I could just have a
much fucked up conception of happiness or well-being. This is
something I don’t heavily debate, so if that’s the resounding
opinion, it hasn’t reached my ears. But part of my robotic
perspective is to try and state things plainly, or at least as
plainly as the data informs me. Yes, I like you. Yes, I get bored.
No, boredom doesn’t mean I don’t like you. No, it isn’t always
about boredom. Yes, I would absolutely like to keep what we have. No,
I will not keep what we have it means I feel I’m made to start
lying about myself. No, I don’t want anything resembling the kind
of things people have been inputting me with since I found an
interest in the subject.
Before something changes, it has the
capacity to do so. It is “ingrained” with an ability to
reformulate around new ideas, behaviors, or environmental settings.
That’s my robot brain. I have little to no control over why it
decides to see things as re-hashing the past, and little to no
control over not wanting to fall in line with what has proven to be
dismal denial ridden insecure and ill-informed relationship rings of
the past. As far as I can tell, it just seems to make sense not to
behave that way.
I won’t equate sex with your
personality or our relationship. I won’t pretend you have a quota
of texts or Facebook comments in order for me to really believe
you like me. I won’t subject my infinitely joking and
dismissive personality so you get an opportunity to feel insecure or
pissed off for something that doesn’t even register once you care
to slow things down and break them into their smallest obvious
conclusions. I have this small, ever so small, robot conception of
self that is responsible for how it thinks and what its thinking may
do to or for the rest of the world. If I’ve managed to actually get
somewhere in my processing, I simply can’t sacrifice it to
sensibilities of a common man. After all, it’s only after
enough of them that I’ve been driven here in the first place.
So when a robot manages to feel, it’s
not an accident. When a robot is trying to be honest, it’s hanging
its reputation on the line because it doesn’t believe you should
accept what it has to say without understanding its reasons. When a
robot is willing to talk about or fight for what it believes in, open
your fucking ears and minds. As a robot, they need a closet and
alcohol. Incorporating you into the mix might as well be an act of
your god. It’s not whining, nor a threat; it’s just the reality
as far as a robot can see. How ironic when the robot gets blamed for
not being able to connect like all the normal people.
