Tag Archives: Robots

Over-automation

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Over-automation

The multifarious uses of all of her devices
led to manifold laziness and other slothful vices.
She never had to scramble to remember anything.
She only pushed a button and her troubles all took wing.
She had no special training. She eschewed an education,
for Alexa solved all problems with her handy automation—
turning on the TV set and opening the doors,
setting off the cleaning robots, expelling the boors,
reminding of vacations and birthdays and appointments,
disciplining naughty kids for lapses in deportments.
Alexa went to work for her and mapped out all her spreadsheets,
polished all her silverware and ironed out her bedsheets.
There was literally nothing that Alexa couldn’t do.
She cooked her children’s breakfasts and took them to the zoo.
Yet still she was suffused by fatigue and wan and thin.
No one could imagine the stress that she was in.
More and more she wound up with her stomach in a knot.
remembering the uses for devices that she’d got!

Prompt words today are knot, scramble, vacation and multifarious.

Evolution

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See how tiny he is? He’s in the corner two bars over from the right.

Click on first photo to enlarge photos and see as series.

Evolution

If we took every advertisement
that we saw under advisement,
envisioning ourselves in cars
filled with TVs and guitars,
food choppers and Barbie dolls—
everything we saw in malls—
we might buy it all and after,
fill every house to every rafter.

Blenders, stereos and blouses
would pile up in our many houses.
Consumerism would be the key
to  how happy we would be.
Lethargic children would sit about
staring at phones in hands, not out
into the world their windows face.
Imagination would replace
a reality no one could cotton.
Our old world would be so rotten—
all it was so ill-begotten
that it had to be forgotten.

Our present world now so diluted
(nature being so polluted)
that the animals our kids would see
would not be out and roaming free
but in some zoo with air protected
and no fluorocarbons detected.
All these things that we could buy
would be what caused our world to die.
Plastic world and plastic lives
would seal us into plastic hives
where we could buzz around in cells
creating our own private hells.

How hard would it really be
to imagine this reality?
How close are we to it already—
Our brains scrambled into spaghetti
by barrages of consumerism?
Could we even heal the schism
that our plastic world has wrought?
Would we give up all we’ve got
for the greener simpler earth
of our great-grandfather’s birth?

Man will speed on toward his doom
in his air-conditioned room
that screens the poisons out while he
sits rapt in front of his tv.
His children, who can no longer stand,
sit, each with eyes glued to his hand.
Only robots will go out
to shop for us and walk about
in air that’s suited only for
machines to venture out the door.

They’ll greet each other in the street,
smiling at each bot they meet.
Perhaps the plastic revolution
was the next step in evolution.
They’ve locked us all within their lairs.
The world they sought is finally theirs
as every human sits and stares
at the unreal world he shares
with every other other fleshly being
that gave up doing for simply seeing.

The prompt words today were key, lethargic, advertisement and envision.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/rdp-monday-key/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/02/18/fowc-with-fandango-lethargic/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/your-daily-word-prompt-advertisement-february-18-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/envision/

Gradual Justice

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Gradual Justice

Life metes out a gradual justice that we may not  see.
Not choreographed for one lifetime, not designed for you or me,
but rather, for the planet or the universe.
There’s no way to avoid it, circumvent it or rehearse.
We’re a part of something larger even as we make mistakes
as nature covers over the snafus mankind makes.
Great men may be jaunty, swelled up with their great plan,
but nature has more problems than looking after man.
She has the heart of all within, seeing a scope broader
than the needs of man or any other great marauder.
There is just so much for any of us. When we grab for more,
we can be pretty sure we may be headed out the door.
What species will replace us, or how will we evolve
if we don’t act quickly our problems to resolve?
Even all technology is part of nature’s plan.
Perhaps it’s written that robots will take the place of man.
Micro chips for healing and mechanical hearts
are only the beginning. They are only the starts.
Species that overgraze domains bring about their endings.
So it may be with us with all our diggings and our vendings.
Machines poisoning our air and putting poisons on our shelves
May only be the means of making more room for themselves! 

 

The prompts today are justice, heart, jaunty and gradual. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/friday-rdp-justice/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/28/fowc-with-fandango-heart/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/jaunty/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/daily-addictions-2018-week-38/gradual

My Promoter

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The Prompt: You, Robot—You’ve been handed a robot whose sole job is to relieve you of one chore, job, or responsibility you particularly hate. What is it?

                                                                        My Promoter

Since Ray Bradbury wrote of one in “There Will Come Soft Rains,”
the list of things robots can do seems to have made great gains.
Some are made to wash our hair. Others shave our heads.
They build our houses, clean our floors and even make our beds.
I grant that it is handy that there’s one that scoops dog poop,
and one to stop our snoring, another to cook soup.
Lonely? One shoots billiards and perhaps it lets you win;
but do not gamble with it, for I hear it cheats at gin.
It’s great that there’s a robot that lifts patients out of bed,
but since I am still mobile, I have other needs instead.
I want a robot that can read and surf the internet
to send out my submissions and to guarantee I’ll get
an agent and a publisher to dispense all my writing
and send it to reviewers so my words they would be citing!
Send it out to libraries, to Amazon and Kindles.
Keep track of my royalties so there would be no swindles.
In short, I want a robot that will publicize and fight
so all this writer has to do is write and write and write.

As far-fetched as these robots sound, they are all based on reality.  For more information, go to: http://mentalfloss.com/article/30898/10-robots-very-specific-tasks