A couple weeks ago, I went to a reading by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. I was looking for things to do in the Cambridge area, and saw that he was going to be reading some short stories from his collection, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, at Harvard Square bookstore on Friday 18 July.

I’d never seen Bojack Horseman before, but some of my former roommates absolutely loved the show. And after reading through the Amazon preview of the book, I was hooked - the stories were hilarious and also strikingly poignant at the same time.

Bob-Waksberg absolutely did not disappoint. He was extremely charismatic in person, and it was really cool to hear him read the stories from the collection, as well as some of his newer unpublished work. He even invited someone from the audience to read one of the stories!

After the event, I bought one of his books and made a line buddy while waiting in line to get it signed; we geeked out about R.F. Kuang, Cuphead, and Hollow Knight. I was impressed at how Bob-Waksberg made an effort to have a conversation with every single person in line; at some of the other signings I’ve been to, the author just gives a quick “hello”, signs the book, then moves on.

Of course, whenever someone cool who I don’t know very well talks to me, my brain absolutely short-circuits. “Perhaps”, it thinks to itself, “if I speak as few words as possible, I will minimize my chances of sounding stupid.” Which, unfortunately, has the side effect of making me seem standoffish and unsociable. During our conversation, he asked me what I did for work, what brought me to Boston, how I found out about the event, etc. When he learned that I worked in a computational field, he asked me if I was worried about AI taking over.

“A little,” I said. And then, after a bit of hesitation, I truthfully amended my answer: “A lot.”

Once I got home, ideas about AI kept turning around my head. About machines making our lives easy, about the value of effort, about the process of learning. And that inspired this little piece of writing. Originally, I thought I’d share it with Bob-Waksberg, but he seems like he has absolutely zero social media and a cursory internet search revealed no easy way to contact him, which, respect. Social media makes me super anxious and weird, so I get it. Since I can’t reach him, instead, I’m going to yell it into the infinite void of the internet. To whoever who you are, if you’re reading this - I hope it resonates with you.

Finally, the machines can do everything for us.

They started out small; washing our dishes, drying our clothes, cleaning our houses. Simple tasks. Menial labor, really. Things that didn’t require brainpower whatsoever.

As the machines grew in complexity, they began being able to do other things for us. Things like giving us directions to places, organizing our calendars, replying to our emails.

A small portion of the population began wondering if we were giving the machines too much power; if one day, they would turn on us. As of yet, those worries have been unfounded. No SecBots have ever attacked their owners, no NurseBots have ever killed their patients.

At some point in time, they started to be able to think for us. And now, the machines can do everything for us. They are our teachers, our doctors, our nannies, our archivists, our entertainers. Some of them are our lovers.

Some would even argue that the machines can do things better than we ever could. After all, they don’t suffer from the heuristic shortcuts that an organic brain is prone to. They can beat us at our own games. They can process entire tomes of text in a matter of minutes. And they can listen to us, with the infinite patience that comes with not having to worry about death.

The machines are everywhere, now. They can tell us what we want before we even know it ourselves.

They can dream for us.

Finally, we never have to do anything ever again.

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And suddenly, that is when we discover that maybe we want to do things. Even though we might make mistakes, even though we might not do as good of a job as the machines would.

Maybe we want to weed the garden, to tug the persistent roots out of the ground, to feel the wind on our face and the hot sun on our necks.

Maybe we wave HouseBot aside, take the still-warm laundry into our hands, and turn chaos into order, filling drawers with folded shirts and twinned socks, letting our minds wander as we lose ourselves in the meditative task.

Maybe our child decides that they want to make their own peanut butter sandwich instead of asking NannyBot to make one.

Maybe we choose to sit before a blank page, reflecting in our journals, writing our own love letters, and painstakingly picking out the combination of right words that will convey our thoughts.

And maybe, we realize: even though the machines can do everything for us, there are still some things that are worth doing ourselves.