In
the ever increasing search to find ways to eliminate unnecessary human
connections in the modern world, an online food ordering and delivery service company
from the U.K. called Just Eat is going to be using robots to deliver food that
has been ordered online. Seven of these
special robots, which are really sort of like boxes on wheels, have been leased
from Starship Technologies, the British company developing these sidewalk
self-driving drone robots. Each of these
boxes can hold a large bag of delivery food.
No longer are customers, who receive their deliveries from these robots,
going to have to worry about tipping a delivery boy or girl. In addition, sometimes there just simply aren’t
enough humans to deliver all the orders that are generated at peak times at
traditional delivery restaurants. With
these robots, no one is going to have to wait an unusually long period of time
for their food.
In
the U.S., there is a gourmet sandwich company called Jimmy John’s that prides
itself on how fast its delivery people can deliver its food. It has these ads where there are
conversations between a driver and a manager, and both people are talking
superfast as a sign that the company is aware of how important time is for its
typical customers. Sometimes people’s
work in today’s world doesn’t allow them much time to eat, but very often it is
simply a matter that when modern people are hungry, they want to eat right
away. It’s not just that they feel
physically hungry. It is also that they
want immediate gratification to fill the experiential void they feel inside
themselves. By talking fast, the actors
for these ads are trying to indicate that the people at Jimmy John’s can operate
like high-speed machines to help customers fill the void. A machine is thought of as being fast and
efficient and it doesn’t waste time.
But
now with the Just Eat robots, we won’t have to worry about people who try to
work like machines, and who, therefore, inevitably make mistakes. We will have machines making the deliveries,
entities that can just be themselves and do the work they were meant to do.
Now
pretty soon, even without these chests on wheels, machine delivery for all
sorts of items will become fairly common, as all kinds of drones are used more
and more. But there is something
particularly disturbing about the Just Eat robots delivering food. Food is perhaps the most experientially
grounded thing that humans produce. It
is nutritious for the body and nurturing for the mind and the spirit. It provides an important grounded component
to a person’s field of experience both internally and externally.
And
because it is such a special phenomenon for human beings, it was traditionally
surrounded by other grounded components to make a more fully grounded field of
experience in the lives of people. In
traditional societies, people would normally sit down together at meals with
family and guests and break bread together.
Among many groups, people would give thanks to their spiritual entity
through prayer for the bounty of their meal.
The grounded connection was made of food, family or community, land or
sea, and spirit or spirits. All was part
of one organic entity.
As
societies evolved, and more vocational specialization occurred, there developed
inns, tea houses and public houses – gathering places where people could eat,
drink, and sometimes sleep away from home and family. Nevertheless, there was still the idea of
bonded human connections between the server and guest. Frequently, along with food, the server would
provide the guest with conversation to make him feel welcome. These places could be so welcoming that community
meetings were sometimes held in them. As
the food business grew, and more and more people ate out – sometimes because of
work and sometimes because people simply had the discretionary income to eat
out more and didn’t want to bother with cooking – restaurants evolved and
servers became more focused on serving food rather than on making small
talk. Dining became less leisurely, and
most restaurant owners and managers became more focused on volume of customers
– getting customers in and out.
The
trend of perceiving food as defined discrete hopefully tasty nutrition and less
as flowing blendable continual nurturance has continued to grow with the
advances in technology. The availability
of the car meant that food could be acquired even more quickly at
drive-ins. Furthermore, the use of
advanced cooking machinery meant that food could be acquired quickly with a
minimum of bonded connection with a server.
Hence, all the fast food outlets that serve people quickly, even when
the people don’t use the drive-through windows.
There
has also been the acquisition of food at automats and vending machines. Automats seem to be extinct now, but vending
machines continue to be as popular as ever, and many places like hospitals have
rooms filled with them. At both automats
and vending machine rooms, there has been no bonded connection between the
customer and the person who puts the food in the appropriate places in the
machine. Here the customer receives his
food from within the complete experiential vacuum of the machine.
And
yet to use an automat or a vending machine, a person still has had to go out
into the external world, where he is likely to encounter other people with whom
he can socially interact. With the Just
Eat robot, a person can stay in his home and have food delivered to his home
and, if he is not living with someone or some ones and if he is not having
people over to visit, he never has to encounter other humans. He can build a social vacuum in his home.
For
many food service places, the idea of a delivery robot is very appealing. As robots replace humans in the food services
industry, it will mean getting rid of the cost involved with wages and
insurance for delivery boys and girls.
It will also mean that food service places won’t have to purchase
vehicles for delivery people. In
addition, robots don’t take vacations and don’t need days off (unless, perhaps,
there is a repair issue). So robots
could be potentially a cost effective substitute for human delivery people in
the food services industry.
But,
as has been discussed many times previously in this column, there is a
different kind of price to pay for the substitution of robots for humans. Not only does it involve shutting humans out
of one more form of work, but it involves disrupting one more area of human
connectedness, one more part of the larger social grounding in human
communities. If robots take over
everything in the area of human services, the experiential distortion will be
enormous, and social isolation in an experiential vacuum will lead not only to
growing mental health problems but also to growing robotization, as people
become more and more like the complex behavioral entities (namely, the robots)
that surround them. And this will be
because more and more robots and other complex machines will become their
dominant sources for mirroring and modeling.
In short, we will increasingly become like the complex behavioral
entities that we use.
© 2016 Laurence Mesirow
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