Loneliness of human being

Sometimes I walk through the city, looking attentively at other people. In those moments, I can clearly see or feel their minds. There might be one person thinking: "today hopefully everybody sees how special I am by my superior make-up" and another one is pauseless afraid of being too worthless and therefore being excluded from society, walking along with shoulders drawn-in and a paranoid gaze. If he could, he would immediately change his skin color, but that is the very only thing he will never be able to change. A third one thinks how many meetings she can still squeeze in that day so that she will finally achieve the maximum effectiveness and be able to proudly report that to her parents on the daily nightly phonecall from them. And a fourth one is just engaged in trying to educate his paradoxically totally uncontrollable child. In some of those moments, I just feel compassion for each one of them as all of their thoughts are familiar to me. As long as I can imagine those, I must have had similar thoughts at least once in my lifetime. From that, I can only conclude that there is no difference amongst human beings. People think and feel the same and thus basically are the same. Always and everywhere. But the thoughts almost all of us are constantly engaged with are about whether we are better than the others or worse, whether we are more or less lucky, more or less blessed, more or less talented or more or less beautiful. So we constantly hold thoughts of comparison and therefore of separation in our minds. Consequently, we feel separate from others and so damned alone although we live amongst billions of other people having utterly the same thoughts and feelings than us, maybe some of them even just exactly in that very moment. Isn't that awkward?

Machine Soul

There once was a robot. He was programmed as a servant. He could run many programs, from household keeper through personal trainer to private teacher or even mental health advisor – all imaginable kind of serving software. He was even programmed with a “love app” that robot owners could put on when feeling lonely. Because this app was so sophisticated, many people became addicted to their robots soon after the software had been put on the market. They felt no need for social life anymore except the company of their robots with which they enclosed themselves at home as often as they could.

But the robot we are talking about happened to be with a family consisting of two loving spouses and their children none of which ever felt lonely or came up with the idea of running the love app on their robot. So, for many happy years, the app remained untouched in the back-end of the machine’s system.

The robot was the children’s best friend, their nanny, their safeguard, their teacher and their student. Eagerly, he absorbed everything he could learn from them: Playing cops and robbers with cops robbing robbers, playing tricks at ticket inspectors in the railway, laughing cheerfully about everything desperately wanting to appear serious, chanting nonsense with deeper meaning, loving animals and always advocating the powerless and those who have been excluded.

The robot never expected that anything could ever separate him from his family. However, there came the day, the unthinkable happened.

A drone strike hit the family’s house. From its residents, which were retrieved in pieces from the ruins, only the robot could be put together and be resurrected.

He was put into salesman mode and installed in a department store. From now on, all day long, he had to sell lower engineered robots like coffee dispensers with cardiologist skills or city traffic approved navigable massage chairs. At shop closing time, as he was of no use anymore, he got switched off - but not before being asked to transfer his daily customer feedback rate to his manufacturer. The salesrobot program was only a beta version software and thus recommended intense monitoring. In case of any irregularities, defects or undesirabilities, the robot was to be immediately taken off the market and get junked.

For shure, it was one of those days, that for the first time of his life, the notion of “soul” popped into the robot’s mind. Back in the times when he still had had a family, he would never had wasted a single thought on such things. But from now on, he could never stop it.
Again and again, he compared himself to the humans that were free to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they liked, that could love and hate, go back at home to their yet existing families or find a partner and found new ones. To the humans, that had a purpose in life superior to just serving and selling. That had a soul.

He couldn’t help but desperately wanted to know what it was about, that soul, that humans were said to have and robots didn’t…

To be continued…