Robotic culture in USA

After staying for a long time in USA, I returned to India and experienced a huge contrast in social culture, where I felt at home with unpolished and talkative crowd expressing their individual responses and emotions in offices, market and social gatherings.

In contrast, I found sophisticated, well mannered and object oriented and confined talk by people at all places in America which was typically robotic with suppressed emotions to adhere with strict norms of good behavior. Whether you go in hospital, mall, hotel or even garden or any gathering the experience is monotonic, disciplined and respectful.

Somehow, I felt that the people living there are becoming aloof from society and are just being considered as consumers or customers with no attachment or belongingness with rest of the crowd. Big corporate and administration demands that the workers and citizen behave in carefully crafted rules and regulations and achieve desired goals anonymously. They are treated as replaceable items to give desired outcome.

I had read a Russian novel ‘Everything but love’ long back, where the man gets a robot as wife, well and carefully designed to suit his requirements in minutest details like shape, look, beauty, responses and even pre-build emotions. He feels happy and boasts his possession with his friends who had wives with lot of imperfections and unmanageable quarrels. However, soon he realizes that robotic wife cannot give him the true love with human soul.

I am afraid, that in our pursuit of perfection, efficiency and unbiased just responses, we are forcing the people to abandon their inherent distinctiveness and turning them into well managed perfect society.

Even if we succeed in it, robots are going to outperform humans and would enslave human beings as they are heterogeneous in composition and fail with repetitive work and stressful conditions.

We have to think seriously where we want to go. Whether to achieve great success and prosperity with robotic culture or preserve our relations, traditions, old beliefs and rituals and remain where we are, imperfect, diversified but full with sensations, emotions and memories of past which preserve and nurture our minds rather than glorify bodies with material wealth and behavior to suit the ideal norms of social interaction..