My Girl

I can’t live without her. She knows all my private thoughts, helps me manage my finances, appointments and projects, catalyzes my social life, and is always there to indulge my flights of fancy and hair-brained schemes. She allows me to work in peace, always reflecting that blank expression of hers that is neither approval nor disapproval, but unconditional love. I have become that guy who spends every waking moment with his girl. I find I can’t keep my hands off her. I take her with me everywhere I go and bask in her cheerful glow. I give her my undivided attention and share with her all my thoughts. This is more than just a love affair, it’s an obsession. In my vision I imagine us sitting on the veranda of a vast coastal Mediterranean estate. It is evening, a warm wind blows from North Africa, and we are alone. Briefly, I contemplate diving beneath the static mirrored surface of the adjacent, stylish infinity pool, before returning my gaze to her captivating illuminated screen. I sip my cocktail and continue to edit my manuscript, content with the perfect understanding that exists between us. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Even she, with her fine-crafted silicon chips, boundless memory, and flawless logic could not handle my ceaseless demands and the pressures of my work. It is only now after her breakdown that I wish I had taken better care of her and been more attentive to her needs. If only she had been able to communicate her torment, then I could have intervened before it was too late.

Only after I could no longer turn her on, did I realize that I had fallen in love with her. Perhaps it is a little perverse, to love one’s computer, but in reality no one has ever been more faithful, dependable, honest and open with me. There is no one I have spent more time with and, because she had access to my whole life, no one who knew me better. She kept contact with my friends via email and social networking sites, and archived the pictures of all the important moments in my life. She could quote my writing word for word, and had lovingly saved a copy of every story and article I had ever written. She knew my work habits, employment history, loan obligations, and the addresses and geographic coordinates of everywhere I have ever lived, worked or gone to school. In effect, it’s frightening how much control she had over my life and how much I depended on her.

It’s called codependency. Then you wake up and realize that you’ve spent more time with your computer and other gadgets than your friends or family. The technology you had no need for just a few years ago, you can no longer live without. Now you wear a Bluetooth headset everywhere you go, you interact with your friends or colleagues while listening to your own private soundtrack on your iPod, and you prefer to text friends instead of talking to them, for efficiency’s sake. You add friends on Facebook and then never send them a message. Friends add you and never send you message. With your Palm Pilot or iPhone you are always connected, and though this means no privacy or downtime, you prefer it to being alone with yourself. Your personal network is larger than ever, yet you’re spending more time alone watching Netflix movies delivered to your door, playing first person shooters and surfing your custom cable service on your integrated entertainment system, while streaming music from the internet. You have all information at your fingertips anytime you want, you can locate and connect with anyone at a moment’s notice anywhere in the world, yet you’ve never had less interest in interacting with the reality outside your door. You are married to technology and divorced from life.

The life I describe above is also my own and, like many, I sense where we are headed.
Coming from a family of early adopters, I’ve already considered the possibility and benefits of having some hardware and software added to my own system. Frankly, I’ve been in need of an optimization for some time now in order to reach peak performance. In particular, I would like solar panel skin to keep charged during the day so I won’t have to sleep at night, a switch to turn off my emotions when necessary, a software program that blocks negative thoughts from entering my mind, and selective hearing and vision to sense only the positive and beautiful in life (talk about deaf and blind!). I would also like to be able to replace damaged body parts and organs with new synthetic ones. New liver, anyone? Arm crushed in some heavy machinery? Just pull it off and stick on a new one, like Legos! Ah, but this is a slippery slope and I am losing my footing. Still, though aspects of the fusion of man and machine may appear on some levels to be morally and ethically repugnant, we cannot avoid their reality. Indeed, they are nothing new if we consider existing and beneficial applications such as hearing aids, prostheses, and pacemakers, to name a few. And what is the difference between pill popping synthetic drugs, and installing a bit of synthetic hardware in our brain to alter our mood, behavior, and performance, permanently?

The problem can be traced back to Natasha (my late, lovely laptop). In the end, the demands of modernity proved too much for her. She drowned in an endless sea of information, was smothered by excessive correspondence, paralyzed by the myriad of tasks assigned to her, and exhausted by the innumerable programs she was expected to master. More importantly, she became obsolete as sleeker, faster, more intelligent models came on the market (though I maintain that I have always been faithful, aside from a coerced relationship with an artless PC at work, which incidentally wasn’t any good). I thought Natasha could do it all, but I was wrong. Her screen went black and I’m still ticking. Which makes me proud to be made 100% organic: nothing but flesh, blood, and bone here (oh yeah, and plenty of sinew and that mysterious gray stuff upstairs).

So far, in spite of our efforts to push artificial intelligence to the next frontier, there is nothing that can top the adaptability, stamina, and ingenuity of the human being. I guess it boils down to the fact that a computer is not yet a self-regulating organism that can heal itself and knows when to say when. Because the computer is not conscious of itself, it cannot create the “meaning” that we humans use to justify and legitimize our existence. Still, you have to wonder, like the evolution of transportation (from the palanquin to the ox cart to the Model T to the hybrid), how long will it take before computers become sentient beings. We are in the early stages yet, but in my vision I imagine myself sitting on the veranda of that Mediterranean estate overlooking the sea, staring into the eyes of my replicant cyborg wife, Natasha, as I marvel at what she has become and hope she doesn’t crush my head between her hands with her superior strength, but rather shows me the finer points of the Kama Sutra after a dip in the pool.