Garbage Trucks and The Human Touch
Sometime in the early 1970's garbage collection became automated. We went from two or three people riding on a truck to one person and a hydraulic arm as a sidekick.
Earlier this week I was watching this magical machine with my daughter and as the truck approached our house she waved to the driver of the truck and he waved back. Then, as the truck drove off down my street, picking up can after can, I began to think about how much time that driver spends alone.
Before the automated sidekick, he would have had a team with him. Fellow garbage collectors who would have had a shared experience of our street and collective memories of my daughter waving to each of them.
But now there is only one person doing this job. And more and more of our world is going in the same direction. We need less people to manage more machines. Don’t get me wrong. I think the automation of the world is a great advancement and the pace of this change will only accelerate.
But as we move in this direction, we need to remember how easy it can be to isolate ourselves in these bubbles. These small cubicles or home offices or garbage trucks where we spend our days alone and without much interaction with our fellow human beings.
We need to high five and hug. We need to shake hands and pat each other on the back. We need to find ways to have shared experieces of the streets we live on and the lives we witness.
So even if Elon Musk is worried about our Terminator like future, I am not talking about machines taking over and destroying humanity quite yet, I am just saying that Rick Springfield may have been on to something back in the 1980's. Maybe he saw this coming a long time ago.
2016 (Watch the first screen he logs into) is coming up and everybody is talking to computers and we are all dancing to drum machines, but we still need the human touch.
Kirk Wheeler is the host of Discover The Road where he writes about how to question everything, make progress, and embrace the journey. For ideas about what it means to live an authentic life, join his free newsletter.
