About Fighting Robots: Basket Rules

Imagine, you have a nice basket, and you use it to carry food home. It’s cool, you can carry more food at once than you would with your bare hands. But then the basket starts telling you what food to get (using “Basket Rules”).

After that, it starts to make deals with merchants in the market and make recommendations based on its own relationships. One thing leads to another, and in a few years, the world runs according to the Basket Rules, and the success of fruit and vegetables is measured in terms of Basket Score, not in terms of their taste or nutritious value.

Am I exaggerating? No. A literal example: Tomatoes. Until I came to the States, I have never seen (or tasted, luckily) the perfectly round tomatoes that I buy here. In nature, they are not perfectly round, and they taste much, much better. However, transporting irregularly shaped tomatoes is laborious, and for streamlining purposes, it’s easier to adjust the tomatoes (at the expense of their taste and possibly their usefulness) than to fuss around with irregularly shaped vegetables. Basket Rules.

Another example: Music. Music has to fit into the speakers, and commercial loudness standards. It might not be the healthiest way of “consuming” sound but it’s the streamlined way of doing it. Basket Rules.

And finally, writing. As a writer, and especially as a journalist, you need to think in terms of soundbites and SEO. And Social. Let’s face it, life is often more complicated than quotes about it. However, the basket is not a friend of complexity. It is not a coincidence that people are gulping antidepressants in large amounts. It is, in fact, logical. Fitting human spirit into a basket is impossible, and any attempt to do so leads to an unresolvable feeling of dissatisfaction. You can throw a thousand iPhones and a thousand Tinder apps into that hole, doesn’t matter. How is it not obvious?

See why I talk about fighting robots? I am not against technology at all. I am against technology driving humans, and against harming people with Basket Rules. Unfortunately, people tend to get carried away. We are all like that, if we don’t know better.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. Baskets can’t talk, nor do they make deals with merchants. It takes a human to speak for the basket.

Photo credit: Chris Barbalis on Unsplash