La Tomatino versus The Terminator

In less complicated times a typical robot was made of tin, stood about twenty cms high, trundled back and forth on squeaky little wheels, swivelled its head, flashed its coloured lights and then tumbled down the stairs and broke.   The problem was they didn’t have much intelligence, and neither did the young kids who played with them.

Nowadays cute and curvaceous robots with gender-neutral voices are giving evidence to parliamentary committees, amongst other impressive activities.  We are repeatedly told, with the smug confidence only a sadist can exhibit, that we’ll all soon be out of a job, and there’s more than a hint that it will get a lot worse than that. 

It isn’t a new notion. Long ago, Punch magazine ran a cartoon strip which began with a man sitting in an office, hands behind his head, feet up on the desk – a regular kind of guy, in other words.  In the next frame, his boss comes in, accompanied by a robot.  There’s no caption but the implication is that the poor slob’s days are numbered. In the final frame we see the robot sitting alone in the same office with its feet up on the desk.

If the robots of the future are going to be as intelligent as movies and the click-baiting media would have us believe, one of the first things they’re probably going to do is figure out how to avoid expending energy – i.e. working.  Domestic appliances have already started. My intelligent, water-wise dishwasher is a good example. It slouches in the kitchen all week, filling its cavernous mouth with dishes and cutlery.  When the time comes to do something, it flashes a small red light, a signal for me to drop everything and rush to the shops to buy it salt and expensive pills.  The insistence comes from my wife, but the machine puts her up to it.  Junkie.

More impressively, smart phones have been travelling the world for years, staying in the best hotels and hanging out at the trendiest nightclubs and beach cafes.  They don’t have legs, or indeed any visible form of locomotion, but what they do have of course is one of us.  Each cell phone gets issued with one of us at the time of purchase Apart from carrying it about, our function is to feed it with data and make sure it’s safely plugged in at night. 

Smart phones have evolved at a remarkable rate, becoming so clever that they must surely be irritated by the kind of drivel we tap into them.  When you’ve got enough computing power to run a NASA mission to a distant galaxy, it must be unedifying to have to spend the day passing on gormless trivia from one human airhead to the next.  Exploding phones are still explained in terms of manufacturing defects, but I wonder.

Clever robots are latecomers in the art of using humans to get ahead in the race for evolutionary success and ultimate dominance.  We may have decimated the world’s forests, but a surprising number of plants have benefitted from their close association with us.  The tomato needs no introduction.  It used to be confined to the sweaty jungles of western South America but look at it now – languishing in sumptuous salads from the breezy Bay of Naples to the plush buffets of Hawaii’s poshest resorts.  Having successfully titillated our taste buds, it grows just about everywhere these days, often in glass palaces designed and built for its exclusive use. 

But despite their proliferation, tomatoes are anything but sinister and they’re ultimately reliant on our fickle tastes.  They will have a tougher time of it in the emerging age of artificial intelligence and robots. With our opposable thumbs we can use screwdrivers and thread wiring so we tend to assume we’ll still be useful to the new robotic master race.  But it won’t be long before the machines start wondering whether there’s any real point in having us around, especially when smart phones keep telling them we’re a bunch of monosyllabic morons.

The bad news for tomatoes is that robots aren’t into salads, pizza or spaghetti bolognaise, so they’ll also soon realise that vegetables take up space and are a waste of the precious resources needed to build more robots. 

Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I’ve been trying to say all along: La Tomatina, the hitherto inexplicable tomato fight festival in Spain, is probably the veggies way of getting us in shape for the impending battle with the brainy but humourless machines.  When the chips are down, thank God for tomato sauce.