The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Amazon, those pesky little dudes whose only dream is to control the entire world, submitted an idea to the Patent Office for a cage that sits atop their robot factory assemblers that can carry a human being. Now, in all fairness, the idea is to protect us homo sapiens from being run over on the warehouse floor by these scurrying machines intent on rounding up our orders. They can send a flesh and blood being into the maw of the warehouse on top of one of these gizmos safely encased in a wire cage where, presumably they won’t be roadkill for the robots. The office will decide if this is a unique enough invention that it can be patented to Amazon.

I suspect the humans who work in the distribution centers of Amazon already feel like they’re caged. But the patent office may find this new wire pen distinct and patentable. Maybe you’re like me, the idea of a cage-carrying robot with one of our species penned like a monkey to its headless shoulder is, well, disconcerting. I know, it’s for our protection. But that’s what the automated voice on our phones says when they inform us we’re being recorded. It’s for our own good. And you believe that, right? Even chickens are getting freed from their cages these days of touchy-feely. But Amazon wants to haul us around the warehouse in one.

We’re all so busy mistrusting the government in this fact-free world we’ve tunneled into that we maybe missed the bigger threat. Amazon, Google, Facebook, all these tech-types rushing toward the future fast as their algorithms and artificial intelligences can take us. Somewhere along their digital highway, humans seem to have been bumped to the back seat of their self-driving vehicles. Most of us are happy enough, kind of like kids with their x-boxes in the back of the SUV, so long as we have our pacifiers. Give us an I-pad and a DVD player, leave the driving to Them.

I just worry the day will come when the door of the vehicle doesn’t open. Or worse, we won’t really care….

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