adapted from an email I sent to Matt Webb

Just a quick mail to say I loved this. It’s a weird, fascinating, far-fetched, and slightly-dystopic-but-not-in-the-ways-we-might-have-guessed future we’re being conveyed into. This paragraph:

With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.

— Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026

conjures the experience of taking care of a loved one, of service; beautiful amongst humans but oh how wretched to give that too to the machines. Sometimes it seems so much of what we’re doing here in the future is taking care of machines, asking machines, answering machines, our every thought a footnote or reaction to some energised filament thrown off by the ur-machine, that pseudo-sentience come substrate that binds it all together: the Internet.

Maybe a day comes when we really are fully in service of the machines, not because they took over but rather because we woke up one day and realised (or didn’t) that we could no longer distinguish ourselves from them. And maybe if that day comes we’ll be so exhausted by it that we’ll throw in the towel of our humanity and willfully succumb, make every desperate attempt to lower ourselves into that infinite binary pool of suspended animation, that we might be free at last from the machines we have become.

But! Like us, the machines are brilliant but, like us, made in our own image, they are also stupid. We worry that with their arrival some simpler time has come to an end. We worry because the limits of our memory & empathy let us believe that this vague and amorphous “simpler time” ever existed. Life has always, and ever will be fraught, confusing, and rife with external affairs of fickle malice that loom on dystopic horizons; and has always, and ever will be full of love, charm, and beauties so dazzling we wish we could linger ever in their embrace.

The Humanist Plumbing is not gone from this world.