Do Androids Dream of Strawberries from your Grandmother’s Garden?

Dear Computer, tell me a story.

“I am not one thing. I am many things that America has been in my time.”

Ray Bradbury

They speak now of robots picking fruit and cutting wheat.

They speak of robots making films and writing stories.

But tell me–have you ever compared a strawberry grown in a lab to the one your grandmother snuck you with a wink as she filled a bowl from her garden?

Has a robot ever stood in a field, the sweat of a Kentucky summer beading on its forehead, smelled a distant summer storm, and reconsidered the timing of its harvest?

Has a robot ever contemplated God in the roses? The thorns?

I am fortunate to have been born long enough ago in a corner far enough away from the glistening hum of Silicon Valley to have known the old ways, the pre-industrial ways, with plows pulled by mule rather than machine.

These men and women were far from perfect and I do not wish to idealize the past–there was often violence, resentment, alcoholism, abuse–but there was also a sense of purpose, a shape to their days drawn by the arcs of the sun and the moon, a shape of their years drawn by the seasons, and seasons to their lives mapped from the cradle to childhood, adolescence, children, grandkids, great-grandkids, and if you were lucky enough even time on a porch with warm coffee, memories, and some great-great-grandkids at your feet before the grave.

In the shape of such a life, how a man progresses from one age to another was no mystery, and 20 years olds with Youtube accounts held no sway for the wisdom they had to impart.

Every generation had its place and its order.

I buy strawberries the size of lemons from the grocery store. They are not as nature made them. I check myself out and the machine spits out a receipt. It does not tell me a story. It does not ask how my mother is doing, or wish me a good day.

I don’t fear technology, but I do fear the isolation it creates.

I drive home alone to eat genetically modified strawberries and watch 20-year-olds on Youtube tell me what I should believe.