On a lighter note...

...I hope to continue my ranting about the reasons behind my fear and loathing of robots soon, but today my head is just not into working with big ideas. I think I may have burned my brain out by being too busy earlier in the week and then put out the fire last night with whiskey. Today I'm having a few cinders spark up and a little smoke puffing up now and then, but I just don't have the willpower to try to kindle it back up into a real fire.

So instead, I've been perusing this Aussie guy's blog. I am getting a real kick out of it. He has a random sense of humor that reminds me very very strongly of my friend's, and weirdly enough that friend lived in Australia for a while. What a happy coincidence.

However, I have a bit of a bone to pick and I'm considering commenting on his page to draw his attention the fallacy of his piece on what he would do if he had a monkey. Now, I actually know a suprisingly large number of people who harbor this same dream of monkey ownership. Granted, I believe I know a larger than average group of openly insane people, but any time that it is brought up, I feel a need to represent the side of sanity. Which, of course, is anti-monkey ownership.

Because, seriously, monkeys? They might be cute in the same semi-human way that makes dogs in little booties and shirts kind of sweet looking, but also creepy. These are creatures who don't need, nor want, anthropomorphizing. They're not people. But they're just enough like us to creep us out. Which makes me hesitant to think of them as pets. They have little... faces. Like ours. Many of those faces are hairless, like ours. Expressive eyes. HANDS. And toe-thumbs and apposable tails, which make them more agile and dextrous than we could ever be. And because they're so smart (like us), they are crafty as hell, and sneaky, and when you add intelligence to a dextrous, agile mix... It gets scary.

But beyond that, even if you don't find their humanoid appearance and smartnessa nd dexterity a little threatening, there's the well-known fact that they are like us in another important way, which is to say very social, which is to say... needy as all get out. They need to be played with constantly or they get bored and start flinging shit (or whatever else is on hand), and they are smart enough to know what is the most valuable and stain-able thing in the room and aim the shit in its direction.

Also, they are batshit crazy. Remember the chimp that went bonkers and almost killed its master's friend? Well, that was an ape with much more strength and higher intelligence than most monkeys, but it's a good example of how primates (and humans do the same thing but that's another story) can just lose it and take out all their frustration - at being cooped up in you crappy apartment being fed Cheetos (you slob) instead of foraging for figs in the treetops - on your face.

I simply cannot see the glamor in having a monkey. Sure, you could teach it cool tricks and probably amuse friends with it, but then that's assuming it likes your friends enough to let them in the house. Monkeys are smart enough to smell douchebag and I bet most of your friends reek of douche, so you have to be careful that your monkey is ok with people before bringing them in to be entertained its tricks, or the shit-flinging will start up all over again. And tricks are all well and good, but you can get a dog to do some pretty cool things and dogs are much more suited to being kept as pets.

I'm just saying, having a monkey only sounds good until you really sit down and start thinking about it. Monkeys are crazy, crafty, sneaky, needy, crazy UN-human animals. They're kind of scary, honestly.

Just wanted to raise some awareness.

A bit in the way of explanation...

So a friend gave me a very interesting essay to read about 'humanoid', 'sociable' robots and their development at MIT. There are a ton of things in here (sorry, it's on paper so I can't link it) that strike me as ridiculously stupid and equally ridiculously terrifying, so if no news stories pop up that strike my fancy for a little while, this may be fodder for a whole lot of posts. Here's one:

The essay describes the development of more human-like robots, their programming to learn like human beings, and the potential for them to experience their own form of very mechanistic emotion, and juxtaposes these developments with the idea that robots are intended to make our lives easier - to do the jobs we find boring or repugnant. And it eventually makes a statement that I found refreshing (and personal):

"To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction - the one between one human and another."

The author, Robin Marantz Henig, has hit the nail absolutely on the head. This idea that one day we may prefer and rely so much on robot interaction is absolutely terrifying to me in many ways, but here I'll try to explain the most practical.

In a word, it's the preservation of human interaction, which modern society seems to be trying to forget is probably the most important aspect to our survival as a species and to the planet entirely, that is at stake here. I fear and distrust robots and other high tech gadgets assimilation into the fabric of our lives for the very simple reason that reliance on them, rather than on other people, for meeting our daily needs, invites rampant individualism on a devastating scale. The more we learn to interact with computers and gadgets and robots, even if they are tools for interacting remotely with other people, the more we forget what it's like to actually interact with people. When we become accustomed to having our coffee ready and waiting for us in the morning because our coffee maker was programmed to do it, and when we're used to having conversations via texting or e-mail (giving the person on the other end ample time to carefully consider every word before sending the message), and when our entertainment options are movies so heavily computer-digitized that we hardly see a person's face on screen, etc etc etc ad infinitum, it's easy to forget that there are real people contributing to all these processes. The hands that picked the coffee beans, the mind that created the text message, the team of people that filmed and produced and labored to make that movie... all are easily lost behind the veneer of robotic precision and easy perfection we get on the receiving end.

We come to assume that all these things are easy to make because they are easy for us to get. We forget that there are people who have dedicated their lives to bringing us these things. We forget how to think about and interact with these people. We become, rather than self-supporting individuals, helpless isolationists who have no idea whose labor went into making the goods that we buy, or the real emotions behind someone's e-mail (much less how we'd deal with these emotions if confronted with them face-to-face with no time to plan out typed responses). We become a bunch of isolated freaks, sipping Mountain Dew in front of our sweatshop-produced computer screens at 3:00 am, making up characters to speak for us in chat rooms and avatars to be us in virtual worlds. Reality drops from our consciousness. We forget about other people.

And in so doing we do what we've seen the people at the top of Wall Street do. The heads of giant corporations with their private jets and gold-inlaid toilets who don't know about or understand or give a shit about what the people he stepped on to get there are doing or experiencing. And it's easy for us in America, using all our gadgets, to do the same exact thing, if on a less-grand scale. It's easy, when you're surrounded by gadgets that do everything for you, to forget that people made these gadgets and made the food they're preparing for you. To forgot that other people exist and have feelings and needs and wants and dreams just like you.

It's a slippery slope, and before you know it we've got people killing each other and dying of starvation in one part of the world, where there aren't computers to send e-mails from, or cameras to record the happenings. And we in places where we have computers and cameras and gadgets just... forget... about those people because they have no presence in our tech world. We forget that our actions affect these people. That our actions affect the world itself. We become so self-centered and self-obsessed that we develop neuroses and allergies and diseases the rest of the world has never heard of, just to keep ourselves busy, because our lives are so easy with all the gadgets we have to take care of our everyday tasks. We sit around and watch other people's neuroses on television.

Real, face-to-face, one-on-one interaction is a powerful antidote to allt hese terrors. Even remembering to make face time with a friend or call a relative on her birthday, remembering that other people are there and are real and legitimate entitites can remind us that our iPods are NOT entities, but the product of the hard work of other people, which is a slippery slope in a more positive direction. Reminders of other people. If we allow ourselves to continue making human connections, we arrive at a kind of globalization of consciousness rather than of wealth or materials goods. If, however, we allow ourselves to continue making and interacting with and relying more heavily on machines to run our lives, we are asking for problems and destruction...

That's enough for now.

Where has my bitterness gone?

Seriously, you guys, I've been sitting here at my desk for like an hour now, poring through all my regular sources of news and blogs and commentary and cute animals pictures and anti-cute animal pictures and trivia... And I haven't seen one piece of information that has enraged me or piqued my paranoia. There were things I'm sure I could have written something pseudo-intelligent and properly rant-y about, for instance, Gmail going down for four hours during the European workday and this being enough fodder for articles in all major publications because it ground business to an almost complete halt. This is a bad sign regarding our total dependence on the internet, and on Google, which is just enough of a cloud site to be sinister, but then I realized that, well, I use Google for Gmail and this blog and some documents and who knows what else, and if my Gmail went down during my business day, I'd be pretty much lost too.

And even though that made me realize that there probably is a conspiracy going on - and not even a robot conspiracy, but a real human one, which is in many ways more infuriating because you can't expect anything but treachery from a damn AI machine, you SHOULD be able to expect some sort of loyalty from your own species, dammit! - to sell all my personal information to anyone willing to pay for it... And even though I have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, and it would probably be best for me to cancel my facebook and myspace and google accounts, or at least remove the vast majority of information I have saved on them all... I just... Well I'm just in too good a mood to go on the long tangent this subject deserves.

I'm just... not upset.

I'm having way too good of a week so far. I've been productive, I got an e-mail from one of my favorite musicians, it's Mardi Gras, I'm getting enough sleep, I had a delicious lunch... I'm just... Content.

Sorry, readers. I'll have to work up some angst for tomorrow.

RIP Russian Rambo

This is interesting, because I've seen headlines about this story a few times in the past week, but the events described actually happened almost a year ago. They happend in Russia, from whence news takes a while to migrate to the States, but a year still seems awfully long.

No matter, though, the point is: this is one of the coolest stories I have ever seen in my life. Why did we not hear about this sooner and see it plastered on as many papers and tabloids and websites as the Rihanna beatdown? As awful as Rihanna's ordeal is (I'm not trying to downplay it - that guy should be locked up with a very large 'top,' if you get my meaning), this Russian Rambo guy went down in, quite literally, a blaze of glory that's worthy of movie deals in as many languages as command a large audience.

Check it out! This guy had been living in a shack in the woods in Russia for 20 years, hunting and trapping and using home-made pistols and myriad other weapons. He was 6'7" and had a giant bushy beard, was batshit insane, and had actually managed to keep all attempts at law enforcement at bay by being, for lack of a better term, absolutely fucking terrifying. He had captured and held hostage several local officials who had wandered into his "territory" in the woods, releasing them with threats after holding them at gunpoint for hours and effectively scaring the shit out of all their buddies, then backed up those threats not to invade his space by torching 30 homes in the area. He'd become such a legend in the area that locals say they wouldn't let their children out of the house without dogs to accompany them - even though many of their dogs had been killed by his traps.

And, when federal officials finally decided to crack down on this "Rambo" figure by sending out six specialists to get him, he wounded two with some of his arsenal before setting a swath of the forest aflame and somehow circling around behind the officers, and preparing to fight them to a man. As one of the officers put it, "It was pure chance the sniper suddenly saw his figure in the trees and pulled the trigger. He shot him right in the head and he died in a flash."

This dude is impressive. I am in awe. I think it's a damn shame they killed him, because I'd love to have heard his stories from in prison, or better yet, to have heard of his legend haunting the Russian forests for years to come.

Not exactly on topic, but impressive as all get-out, and I wanted to share.

The scientific mind.

I will freely admit that my brain is not one that likes numbers and facts. It tends toward fanciful, curlique-d, sparkly fantasies because it finds them more appealing. It doesn't like the concept that according to mathematics, everything has one correct answer, or that according to science, everything can be explained in concrete terms. My brain enjoys mystery and imagination and seeing the magic in everyday occurrences. It is not analytical, reasonable, rational, or in any way modern, and that probably accounts for my innate fear of mathematical and scientific principals being applied to the natural world. To my way of thinking, Nature is not beyond math or science - it embodies them and is made of their principles - but it goes beyond their rules and straight lines and angles and numbers into something so vast and divine that it transcends what we can understand logically. And so when I see things like - ahem - robots, or for that matter genetically engineered food or animals, being made by us in a lab and then put out into the world that, despite our best efforts, is still controlled mostly by the large, unpredictable, uncontrollable whims of Nature, I shudder to think of what could happen. We are striving, in these instances, to control Life itself, which is not only beyond our grasp but beyond our ability to understand.

We cannot predict the future, even if we populate it with artificial things that we have engineered to behave predictably. Because those things, once they leave us and enter into the Natural world, are no longer under our control, whether they are pre-programmed to be or not. Nature is bigger than us and it takes over for us where we leave off. We are not smaller versions of some omnipotent personification of God simply because we understand a few theories about space and time and engineering, and even if we were, who can honestly say that that version of God the Creator we're trying to become didn't monumentally screw up when he made us? We've run absolutely amok. Our robots and genetically altered foods and creatures might do the same to us, and likely will if we don't rein ourselves in, and I don't care who laughs at me for thinking it.

Look at it this way. What's the point of robot technology, at its base? To make human life easier (so we can accomplish more 'worthwhile' things like watching TV and eating our Cheeto's without having to crumple up the bag and throw it away ourselves, presumably). Let's say that, a few years in the future, somebody develops a robot sophisticated eough that its primary goal in existing is to make human life easier. Not sure how you'd go about programming such an abstract idea, but let's go with the robot's reason for being as reducing human irritation, frustration, pain, and suffering. Let's say this sophisticated robot spent some time observing human life and realized at some point that human beings are almost always irritated, frustrated, pained, and undergoing suffering - as long as they are alive. Might not the logic that we have come up with and tried to bestow upon our lab experiment be put to use to conclude that life is suffering, and that therefore humans should be killed, so they will no longer suffer?

That's probably been a movie or sci-fi book plot somewhere along the line, so I don't claim it to be some groundbreaking idea, but you see what I mean, right?

Now let's imagine that rather than just having babies in our chaotic, natural, unscientific (or at least the vast majority being unscientific) way and making a few robots (which I think is a bad idea but it's already being done) and messing around with existing life forms to make them "better" (like we did with Africanizing honey bees, remember how that went? KILLER BEES?) and domesticating other life forms that don't want to be domesticated (the killer chimp? anyone?), we decide to start BRINGING EXTINCT LIFE FORMS BACK BECAUSE IT WOULD BE COOL? Does this seem like a good idea? It does, apparently, to a researcher at Harvard, George Church, who has declared that now that we have mapped the entire Neanderthal genome, we could bring a Neanderthal to life for around $30 million. John Tierny, that genius at the New York Times, apparently thinks that's a really nifty idea. "So why not do it? Why not give Harvard’s George Church the money he says could be used to resurrect a Neanderthal from DNA?" he asks.

...has anybody read about the crazed chimp who tore off his master's friend's face? Or read about the horrible things they do to monkeys in lab experiments and felt bad? Or watched JURASSIC PARK, for God's sake??? (I know, I know, that was science fiction, Lynsey, not reality. Well I have a whole buttload of opinions about why science fiction should be taken seriously, but not enough time or room here to list them.) Neanderthals, for all that we know about them - which is in fact quite a lot, given that we've mapped their genome and studied them ad nauseum anthropologically and paleontologically - were very much, VERY much, like modern Homo sapiens. Modern Homo sapiens being ourselves, being the least predictable or controllable animal on earth (if you put aside what advertising campaigns and brainwashing can do), being the ones who thought it'd be a good idea to stockpile nuclear weapons that could destroy the planet. Who can make robots to do their work but can't figure out how to coexist without shooting each other over whose version of the God we want to be is the best.

And these guys... want to... bring back a near-identical species, the capabilities of which we have no inkling and the reason for whose extinction was probably, like most other of Nature's reasons for extinction except for the ones WE'VE inflicted on other species, very good.

If a chimpanzee (chimps are our second closest living relatives, next to bonobos, and are much, much stronger than humans) who'd been living a pampered life in a woman's home, dressing and feeding himself and using a computer, for years, could rip her friend's face off in a moment of frenzy, what do we think a NEANDERTHAL being raised in a lab, most likely, and poked and prodded and examined and tested to no end by scientists who think it's just fascinating, possessed of an intelligence and self-awareness at least close to that of our own, will do?

I know these sentences are long and confusing, but I find the logic here absolutely mystifying myself. This is madness.

I'm going home, locking myself in my room with my Cheeto's, and not coming out till tomorrow. Forget this. My brain might not be great at calculus, but I'll take my common sense and my imagination and my curliques over this nonsense, thankyouverymuch.

Ok, sorry to disappoint....

But I am TOO excited to write about my paranoia today.

Because...

I just found out I'm getting published!

Aaaaaaaah!

A story I wrote while I was living in Chicago, called "The Hair Cut" (which, to be honest, I don't even particularly like), has been selected for publication in a forthcoming book from Pergola Publishing called "Memoirs of Meanness." The book is a compilation of true and fictional stories, and according to the publisher is being picked up by book groups, and high schools as an anti-bullying aid. Apparently due to financial problems (who doesn't have them?), Pergola underwent a change in management over the past year, but has gotten back on track with its publication schedule. So the story, which I submitted last April, is going in. They say they'd like to print next month!

My story is kind of a two-sides-of-one-brain theme, where I have a narrator telling a story that she keeps messing up, and eventually another part of her brain comes in to help her finish it, and, well, that side is mean. Hence the story fitting into the book.

There's no pay involved, but there's prestige! Fame! Accolades! And I get to do publicity if there are any events.

So, screw paranoia! The Universe LOVES me today!

I don't even have to stretch this one.

Well, I'm back. And frankly, I'm appalled at what I've found happening in my absence. Namely, this article. In a nutshell, if you're not into clicking links, scientists at the University of Sydney are trying to convince us that we should allow them to computerize our traffic patterns based on those used by ANTS: "When opposing streams of leafcutter ants share a narrow path, they instinctively alternate flows in the most efficient way possible. Studying how ants manage this could provide the basis for a system of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms."

Let's rehash that, shall we? The idea here is that, because ants are so much better at avoiding traffic jams (which I'm sure cost us X-billion amount of dollars in lost time at work for commuters every year, and blah blah blah and so on and so forth) than we are, we should mimic their instinctual, mindless behavior, and give up our hard-earned free will while driving to the whims and mathematical precision of a giant computer.

Ok. So, beyond how stupidly over-thought this plan is - since a train system run by a few humans carting around a whole lot MORE humans seems like a much easier and more feasible concept, which already has an infrastructure in place - does anyone else resent the idea of being carted around like ANTS? Not to downplay the achievements of the little guys, since ants really are pretty impressive creatures in their own right. They can lift however many zillion times their own body weight, they're super-organized, and some of them (see: Bullet Ants and Army Ants) are terrifying beyond most (or maybe all) mammal species.

But despite their impressiveness and organization and alien scare tactic powers, I think it's safe to say that humans have definitely won out in the evolution game. Yes, pinchers are all well and good, and apparently the mindless drone thing works really well for ants and bees and what not, but I'm gonna have to step back and say that the apposable thumb, bipedalism, higher intelligence, and free will have put us seriously ahead in the race to dominate the planet. We're doing a whole lot of things right by our very nature, which tends toward bull-headedness and rampant individualism. We are not naturally following each other around for the good of the colony. And say what you will for ant colonies, but I'd defend the idea that New York and Dubai and Paris and Tokyo are a little more impressive.

Not to say that ants are ding it all wrong. I certainly don't argue that a bit more of a collective conscientiousness (sp?) would be a good thing for humanity in general. After all, this whole climate change debacle and many of the other problems plaguing us in the modern world (postmodern world? let's not get into that debate now, shall we?) could be well served if we'd all think about the good of everyone and everything, rather than just ourselves on hot summer days and in our purchasing decisions. It's not that an ant-colony mindset would necessarily be bad in every possible way. But if we were to really emulate ants and live in colonies headed by a queen... well, in our case, a queen would be something like a Jabba the Hut figure endowed with all the persuasive powers of, say, Hitler in his prime, and the political power of a complete despot (no names are coming to me). Terrifying, right?

Now imagine that queen/ruler is... get ready... you guessed it! A goddamn robot! One that is wheeling us around at high speeds in little car-pods all hooked up to its collectively alien intelligence. I do hate to hold The Matrix up as some pinnacle of wisdom, but c'mon, people, how much more obvious does it get that robots are somewhere very high up in the scheming of our world these days? If you think this sounds kind of neat-o, kinda nifty, kinda cool... well, chew on this for a second: '"We essentially would have to hand over control of the vehicle to a collectively intelligent system that would move all vehicles from their source to destination," said Marcus Randall, a Bond University software mathematician.'

I don't even have to truss this one up to make it sound frightening - they are literally trying to let us make robots responsible for transporting us around. Mass transit is scary enough with a capable human being who it's safe to assume has our best interests at heart, but mass transit run by an artificial intelligence that HAS no heart? Based on an ANT brain? '"Drivers optimize their own travel time, without taking much care about others. This leads to phantom traffic jams which occur without any obvious reason. Ants, on the other hand, are not egoistic,"' says one scientist in favor of ant-braining our travel systems. But, you know, I'll stick to egoism, thankyouverymuch. It's what we cling to as human beings, and damned if we haven't climbed our way to the top using it as our grappling hook.

F-ing robots.

See you later, alligator(s).

I'm going to New Orleans. I'm sorry I've been missing posts, but the past week has been a little, well, insane, and now I am going on a short trip for my BIRTHDAY! So I'll try to get up to speed next week, and till then: See you later, suckaaaas!

A PS to yesterday's post

I realized when I took a peek at my blog today that yesterday's title "Oh No, Stephen King, Not You, Too!" made absolutely no sense in light of the subject matter of the post itself, which of course was the Kindle 2.0 from Amazon. (This is why I maintain that one should never give things titles until one is FINISHED with them, and why my book will not have a title until I have written it.)

I titled it as I did because, when I started the post, I intended to write something about how it appears that one of the greatest writers of our time (yes I do believe that, and I don't care what my hoity-toity literati friends say) has released a short story for release ONLY on the Kindle 2.0 medium, at least for the time being. I can't believe one of the smartest guys out there has fallen for the robot scheme, too. But he has, and I was dismayed, and was going to write about my disappointment, but if you read the post, you can plainly see that I became far too wrapped up in my ranting. So. Yeah, post explained! On to today's!

No, Stephen King! Not you, too!

Ok I realize that I appear a little overly paranoid about robots from time to time. Probably a lot of the time. I'm not sure how I feel about this, because in all honesty I'm not sure how seriously I take this paranoia; part of me is worried that if I continue to write about it, I will become more paranoid with each word, until someday I'm living in a dark apartment alone with my cats, with the blinds all drawn and fifteen deadbolts on the door, using only candles and moldy books to entertain myself and babbling about how the robots are out there just waiting to get me. I'll probably have a shotgun and be living on wasabi peas and beef jerky. ...but I'll have strong teeth, I guess, and that's important when fending off starving cats...

Wait, what?

Ok, anyway, so I know I sound a little batty about the robot thing, but I swear I AM trying to keep myself in line. But sometimes I feel like stopping in the middle of a busy intersection, as all the people go by me with cell phones literally attached to their heads, iPod cords dripping from their ears like white brain leakage, staring into their Blackberries and iPhones and PDA's of all sorts, and screaming, "HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD? AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE?"

It's a good thing I'm meeting someone after work today and going somewhere with that person, who would be embarassed to be seen with me if I did that. Because otherwise, today might be the day. Check it: Amazon Launches the Kindle 2.

Ok, first things first: what kind of name is "the Kindle"? I've been wondering that ever since they launched the first, way-too-big, way-too-clunky, way-too-obnoxiously-dumb version. The KINDLE? That's not a word that makes one think of hip, sleek, intelligent, skinny-jeans and-gleasses wearing folk (are those the people who are selling things now? I think so?). No, it conjures up the image, at least in my mind, of small orange flames licking softly at small twigs or pieces of paper. This is not the way to go about selling something, my friends at Amazon. You guys, who so aptly named your company after a kickass mothafuckin band of warrior women who still spur on the wildest fantasies in men's and lesbians' minds (or a really deep and almost endless exotic river and its rainforest, which isn't bad either), could have done better. If you're not going to name it something that sounds super-sleek, at least go for "the Blaze," or "the Bonfire," or something that could whip up a mental picture of something exploding. People like that, too, maybe even more than the sleek, slim, hip thing.

But "the Kindle" just sounds like a few wussy little flames tottering away into smoke as you crouch by a campfire somewhere out in the woods, pretending like you're Davey Crockett in front of you unimpressed friends, who have been waiting there with their marshmallows on sticks unroasted for a while now and are starting to think you're a loser and have never been camping before, even though you have been assuring them you know what you're doing. But so far you've only managed to "kindle" a few sticks and leaves, and they keep going out. In desperation, you look around, and you find... an old book, perhaps. On the floor of your car. Something you forgot you had and so it was easy to overlook that it was missing. Something really dumb, like "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Buying a Stereo System," that you'll never look at again. You might as well just use it to "kindle" you fire, huh?

And hey, now that you're at it, since after all everyone wants to look cool in front of their friends, and as we've already explored, a big blaze is always better than a teeny little flame, who needs to chop up wood to make a fire? That takes way too long and is way too unimpressive. I mean, now that Amazon has launched the Kindle 2.0, nobody even needs books anymore. So - why not just throw your entire library into the flames? Let's "kindle" them all! Make it a blazing bonfire of knowledge and tradition! Who needs the satisfaction of a carefully tended and nurtured library that serves as a respite from the daily grind, decorates a wall of the house, shows friends what kinds of things they like to read, gives off that pleasant smell of leather and old paper, and makes a home feel like a home? As a matter of fact, who needs the very human experience of turning a page by hand, as human beings have been doing since ancient Chinese times? Who needs paper? Who needs books? Who cares if our words are passed down for posterity's sake? We can read them now, at the touch of a button, and who gives a crap if anyone remembers our name a hundred years from now, when ROBOTS will be just BEAMING IDEAS AND WORDS AND SYMBOLS directly into people's MINDS via MICROCHIPS because paper became so pase? Let's just KINDLE all the books ever written! Ban them! Burn them! Bonfires all around! Hell, when we've burned all of them we'll just simulate bonfires on television screens to make us all feel homie in the winter, and so we'll never have to go camping again? ...oh wait, they already do that, too?

...well...

Shit.

I rest my case.