floor5

Floor 5

by Bob on March 29, 2008

New elevators (or lifts if you will) seem to almost all electronic and robotic. And it’s not just elevators. It’s announcements in train cars, on GPS devices telling you how to drive to where you’re going so you’ll never have to know anything or remember how to get there, and even in the loo to remind you to flush it if it doesn’t do it by itself.

It’s definitely radical compared to when I was a youngster and we had actual real live human elevator operators who had a name like "Tommy" who would greet us when we got in the cab and asked us which floor we wanted to go to. No buttons to press. Just "Tommy" the elevator operator. He even knew the sports tables and scores, too.

It’s all a bit mad like Dave and HAL (the computer) in Kubrick’s 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey". Especially in the end when HAL loses his electroplated mind singing "Daisy Bell" better known for its lyrics of "Daisy, Daisy/Give me your answer true/I’m half crazy/All for the love of you" -- all about love and a bicycle built for two which was a brilliant song to choose for HAL’s meltdown whilst Dave pulls memory boards from HAL.

At the university library it’s quite maddening when one of the elevators gets intellectually "stuck" in one mode and on one floor and it sings it a gloriously boring monotone "FLOOR FIVE, FLOOR FIVE, FLOOR FIVE, ..." ad nauseam until some mechanic fixes it or until the next day. So one is preplexed and somewhat disturbed to listen to "FLOOR FIVE, FLOOR FIVE, FLOOR FIVE ..." in the university library whilst reading a maths text on gradients and tensor analysis or a great novel in literature.

It’s the fiddly attempt to make it all sound human that’s actually annoying. It eerily not human at all but has this angelic-like voice quality with a devilish tone which will drive one real human mad listening to it all day.

"FLOOR FIVE, FLOOR FIVE, FLOOR FIVE ..."

I prefer real human beings and their live voices, if that means anything anymore since everything is recorded and digitally re-mastered, even a voice on a cell phone. Hearing someone’s real voice up close and in person is really important for humanity to survive, lest we all become virtual reality shape shifters flying along the internet or e-space highway.

We no longer seem to have control over an infinitely repeating elevator voice which has gone haywire. No one can shut it off easily. So we are a prisoner to it.

Now, Karel Capek probably thought about that when he wrote the 1921 play "R.U.R." (Rossum’s Universal Robots) wherein he invented the word "robot". But his use of "robot" was derivative of a Czech word meaning "slave worker" or "hard laborer" or "drudgery". So I wonder if we humans have changed roles. We are the slave and the robot is, although without seeming sentience or awareness, or let alone a soul, the master and not the slave.

We had better watch out lest all those predictions about robots taking over humans might just happen. And what’s scarier about that possibility is that the robots won’t likely even know anything, let alone that they’ve taken us humans over, or more precisely that we humans have given our lives over to their control.

It’s happening.

If someone loses their cellphone, they have no idea how to call anyone because they don’t remember ever having dialed their phone numbers like in the old days when all we remembered were numbers we had to dial. Your cellphone knows your friends numbers, not you anymore.

That’s happened.

Time to watch "2001: A Space Odyssey" again. The late Dr. Arthur C. Clarke knew all too well of these possibilities.

Oh, yes, I think I’ll first listen to the Pistols 1977 song "Pretty Vacant" first. And the refrain goes "Oh we’re so pretty/Oh so pretty vacant". Maybe I’ll follow that song up with the additional 1977 song "Blank Generation" by The Voidoids. So it is.