New Mexico Mercury

I like to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world. That’s why I try to examine magazine covers every time I’m in the grocery store checkout lane.

Hoo boy. Already I can envision the fan mail I will receive from the educated-at-a-college-that-doesn’t-even-HAVE-a-football-team crowd. They will ream me for collecting my news from the impulse-buy section. And then they will slyly inquire—you can practically hear them typing more quietly—whether the rumors about Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise are true.

Let me cut off all such correspondence by saying: I can’t read the headlines in the checkout lane! I’m always too stressed about bagging my own groceries because the stores don’t hire enough baggers anymore. I remember you used to have two, even three young people prepared to stuff your canned vegetables atop your bread and bananas. One of them would gladly wheel your food to your car, where he would hurl it in the trunk and wish you a nice day.

Such customer service is unheard of anymore, at least until someone invents a machine to wish me a nice day. Until then, I’m left ruining my own groceries.

I now have reason to believe that such a glorious future may already be in the past. I discovered this at my public library where, unhurried by checkouts and surrounded by lifetimes of knowledge bound in sacred tomes, I scour headlines in peace.

And ONLY headlines. Magazines are vessels for advertisements, and thus to read a complete article is to expose oneself to subliminal commercial violation and also those really strong scratch-and-sniff perfume strips. Headlines have never misled me. They are pure, distilled journalism that gives me the straight facts without making me sneeze.

The headline that got me so excited was on the current issue of Popular Science: “Will Your Next Best Friend Be A Robot?” It better be, if we want a much less socially awkward future! Friendship hierarchies are COMPLICATED. We all know that dogs are our best friends. Yet whenever I tell a human friend that he is my next-best friend, my second fiddle, my solid Number Two, he gets all butt-hurt. A robot, however, will be programmed to return my phone calls even when it’s mad at me.

I had to know more about the awesomeness of the future, so I tore through back issues. “The Future of the Car: How the Automobile Is Becoming More Than Just a Vehicle” promises that the copywriters at Popular Science know how to use a thesaurus effectively. It also declares that these conveyances are “Social, Self-Aware, Connected.” I hope that means my roadster will actually add me back on Google +!

But the same cover whispers, “People are gullible. Machines are smart. That’s a problem.” Um, hello? That’s not a problem. It actually works completely in our favor if all smart machines turn out like Herbie the Love Bug, interested in lending a fender to the down-on-their-luck.

Yet the deeper I researched, the more I didn’t think that was the case. A different issue declares, “The Next Frontier of Surveillance: Your Car.” Friendly motorbuggies don’t spy on you! This turn of headlines sounds like we have secretly returned to a terrible state of McCarthyism. (Get it? McCARthyism. It’s like a Red Scare, only with wheels!)

I jest, but only to soften the REALLY bad news, like the “25 Reasons to Love Drones (and 5 Reasons to Fear Them).” As reason #1, the cover offers, “They’ll soon be delivering your dinner.” That leads to all kinds of shaky questions, such as: Is that a reason to love drones, or to fear them? Because a pizza delivery drone is not a teenager, am I morally obligated to tip it? Is five percent enough, or will that insult the drone and cause it to remove me from its circles?

Lest you think that the drone invasion is only someone else’s problem—namely, mine—take this little tidbit into account: “Why Is Google Building a Robot Army?” Let me go on the official printed record here: I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s not simply to populate Google +, nor to hunt down people who slam Google’s innovative and revolutionary social network.

If Google’s motive turns out to be evil, regular schmoes like us can “Defend Your Home with Artificial Intelligence.” That’s a great solution—if you’re willing to put your next best friend AND your motorcar in the line of fire. I’m not, which means civilization may be doomed. At least there will be a whole new form of life to populate the earth after all the humans are dead; I read that Tom and Lindsay may be getting serious.

(Photos: Tom Cruise by Georgies Biard; Robot by JD Hancock / CC; Lindsay Lohan from Wikimedia Commns)