Resistance Really Is Futile

As I mentioned last time, AI and I have apparently established some sort of relationship.  I’m not sure just yet what type of relationship, but so far AI seems concerned not only about my physical well-being (see aforementioned quicksand escape videos), but also about my mental health.

Like many people, leading up to the recent U.S. presidential election I was feeling pretty stressed, what with the non-stop onslaught of robotexts, robocalls, political commercials, and of course the news feeds.  One day I had been doomscrolling for a while (okay, several hours, all right?) when I came across this nifty video about – wait for it – woodworking on a lathe.  Yes!

It was utterly mesmerizing.  If you’ve never seen such a video, treat yourself.  You might think what’s the big deal, all they’re doing is holding a metal rod against a piece of wood while it rotates and the piece of wood gets smaller.  Indeed, that’s what it looks like at first.  The artist does some preliminary shaping, but then the fancy work starts.  As your eyes follow the shaping rod back and forth, the wood seems to almost liquify.  The artist creates movements in the wood that rise and fall, like ripples metronomically expanding and contracting across the water of a pond.  It was like watching the creation of a Mobius strip by following a single thread to infinity.

My AI caretaker, in its wisdom, sent me many such lathe-turning videos and I absorbed them all.  But suddenly, there were no more.  I was bereft.  I could only assume that AI felt it had properly taken care of me during the election and was encouraging me to move on to something else, so I did.

I saw a post for “The 10 Most Clever Things on Amazon”.  I checked it out, and there were indeed some clever things on the list.  The post very helpfully included a link to the Amazon page for each item.  More posts showed up: “The 25 Best Things on Amazon Today”; “15 Things You Didn’t Know You Wanted”; “25 Things You Didn’t Know Your Kids Want”.  There were dozens of posts, and I was engrossed.  There were so many things that I never knew about!  So many, many things!

So – to recap, I currently have 109 items in my Amazon cart.  I’d better start looking at financial responsibility posts before it’s too late and I start seeing posts about Dickens-era poor houses.  I also have the suspicion that I really don’t want AI to start thinking it has to monitor my bank account.