Our progress?

I rode unfamiliar bus routes on the way to work today, owing to a medical appointment that took me out of my normal weekday travel path. Naturally, I was not surrounded by my usual ‘bus buddies,’ and so found myself surreptitiously examining the inhabitants of routes 241, 235 and 550 westbound. I spent most of my 550 ride sitting across from a woman in reference to whom one might be tempted to apply ‘denizen’ as a descriptive moniker.

I only assume this was a woman as she seemed to have a woman’s eyes. That one horizontal stripe across her face was the only part of her that was exposed through the many layers of this and that she used to protect herself from elements that are probably not limited to weather. She staked out most of the width of the aisle between us with her home-on-a-handcart so that the folks getting on and off the bus had to step around her and over me in order to pass without tripping. So in self-defense I gave up on reading my NOOK in order to stand watch and avoid catastrophe.

My traveling companion nodded off repeatedly between ruts and bumps when she would jerk awake and peer around defensively. I found myself wondering if the relative safety and warmth of the bus ride wasn’t a highlight of her day. A driver once told me that on really cold nights, homeless folks will sometimes ride the bus all night, transfer to transfer and back again, hiding out in the bus tunnels until encouraged to move on by Metro security folks and then starting all over again. Those who have passes, that is.

We both got off at Westlake and after spending a moment figuring out which stairway I needed, I found myself walking behind her. Her cart made a constant thubbing sound that upon examination turned out to be from the left wheel rubber ripping away. It won’t be long before her cart becomes a travois and the portability of her travelling set will be seriously diminished.  I don’t know her story and can’t confidently predict her future but I’m pretty sure, based on the carefully folded blanket and sheets among her stack and the torn plastic that offered dubious protection from the afore-mentioned elements, that everything she owned was on her back or on her cart.

A few hours later, while eating my Chipotle burrito bowl and browsing the day’s news on the Net, I came across an article on robotics in which an engineer interviewee posited that the use of robots would allow ‘us’ to bring back “a lot of work from overseas.” His assertion rests on the idea that it’s the lower-paying repetitive-motion production jobs that have moved to countries (sometimes even states) with lower pay scales and non-existent worker safety protocols. And then, looking at the news feed from MIT, I read an article about some cutting edge commercial application work in robotics that seems similarly aimed at replacing human workers. The speaker in this case wasn’t even personally invested in the outcome so much as the development work.

“Really, we just enjoyed the hard engineering and design and wanted to build cool stuff. This was a fun way to do it.” He found a use to justify some interesting work rather than finding a need and filling it. And I don’t blame this young PhD. It seems we do a lot of that these days.

Yes, I know I’m making lots of assumptions in areas in which I have neither standing nor expertise. But I can’t help coming back to the intersection of two ways to formulate what seems to me a critical question: can we versus should we. 

Robotics is definitely a cool and vital discipline. Robotic devices allow us to go places and do things that no human could safely or effectively undertake and to do things repeatedly that would drive humans to distraction and cause unacceptable repetitive motion injuries. Robotics research leads to breakthroughs in devices that reduce barriers for persons living with disabilities. I get all that. I’m on board.

But is the development of a robot that can perform human-like functions and even accomplish some analog of social interaction an important and worthy pursuit when we have people riding from bus tunnel to bus tunnel to stay dry and warm?

Is the woman with the breaking down hand cart part of the ‘us’ that is bringing the work back from overseas?