Fool's Gold: Letters from an Automaton

By Zach Hively

Be human: Procrastinate with me!

A disturbing thing happened to me. I was procrastinating by appearing, to myself, to be busy and productive. I do this by checking email.

I know—because I read it in a book, which for me is another powerful justification for not actually working—that the most efficient relationship I could have with my inbox would be to check it at a set time once a day and deal with all important correspondence at that time.
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This limitation reduces the sense of urgency that colleagues, marketers, and other robots imbue their emails with. After all, nothing truly urgent gets communicated in an email. That’s what tagging me in a post is for.

You can’t tell me that letter-writing is anything more than Victorian procrastination.

Yet the problem with being so efficient with the inbox strategy is that it leaves one with all this available time to fill, and nothing much to fill it with—except the truly fulfilling work that one needs (for a variety of deep and unresolved psychological reasons) to keep punting to a distant future that I haven’t finished earning for myself, alright?

So I have gotten terribly, wonderfully efficient at pretending that I will check email only once a day. I have gone so far as to relocate my email app to the second screen on my phone. Actually, though, I check it much more often, such as every time I think of it, and many times when I don’t. It just happens. It’s involuntary. Like sneezing, or finishing a tube of off-brand potato chips when in reality I just got up for a glass of water.

Now, I do not generally do anything with the emails when I check them. They sit there, filling my screen until I get enough new emails to bump them off the screen and out of my life for good. Sometimes I will open one and click “unsubscribe,” under the guise of preventing myself untold hundreds of future emails. For this, I applaud myself. If there is no “unsubscribe” button, I simply reply “unsubscribe,” which has greatly reduced the use of my inbox as a form of social interaction.

But for the most part, the emails just keep piling on, increasing my anxiety for all the not-yet-done things still to do, making me feel like I must be Very Important Indeed. Such people do not—cannot!—waste time on things with a risk of failure, things like creating art, or learning new skills, or making friends. We do not have, as Very Important Indeed people say, the bandwidth for that.

Which is where the disturbing thing that happened to me comes into play. I am ostensibly, if you have not yet noticed, a writer. I write things. Mostly on deadline, or not at all. But emails—emails provide such a reprieve from the pressures of productively writing things because they are writing-adjacent. We writers, who (based on our anxiety levels) are Very Important Indeed, can rest very late at night with the comfort of having written something during the day.

Then my inbox changed on me. I opened some email or other, fully intending to type “unsubscribe” my own damn self so I could sleep that night, when the compose window popped up another window proposing my very own AI Assistant that would, it claimed, craft responses for me.

Maybe this does not disturb you. Maybe you dread crafting your own responses. Maybe you’re one of those early adopters who use new technological breakthroughs when the emphasis is still on “break.”

I will own up to being a late adopter. I treat technology a lot like dogs in this way: I like to adopt one who has worked out enough glitches to pee outside reliably rather than in.

A gift, signed to my dogs, by New Mexico artist Ralph Sanders.

So, no, I am not the AI Assistant target audience. I am, however, powerfully offended. Why would I, a self-appointed writer, want to replace myself? I mean, okay, I genuinely do want to replace myself most of the time. But I want to replace myself with other human writers—ones better than I am, if I can afford them, which I can’t, because I’m a writer. Writers need the work, dammit. And we need all the help we can get.

Right now, all around us, marketers and other robots think just because they are robots that they can trust other robots to do all the work for them. In some ways, I get it. Let’s hire robots to talk to other robots and free up the humans to get really freaking uncomfortable with all their free time. So uncomfortable that we have no choice but to make art and other creative things, because it’s either that or talk to each other.

I just don’t trust that’s how it’s going. So far, every breakthrough that promises more time, like automated dishwashers and motorcars and the ability to play podcasts at 1.5x, simply demands that we humans get more productive with that time. We’re squeezed dry.

This, I believe, is my increasingly-resolved psychological reason for procrastination: I am not a machine, even when I act like one.
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So I’ll keep typing “unsubscribe” myself, thank you very much. It’s a small thing, but I think that human touch will mean something to the robot on the other end. Something disturbing, I hope.