Mr. Roboto

The old saying, originally coined by Ben Franklin, holds that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Franklin’s clear-eyed genius was proven yet again with the announcement earlier this week that Amazon will soon be deploying a fleet of drones to deliver merchandise right to the consumer’s doorstep. Drones, of course, are already famously linked with the death half of the equation as the first line of offense in the American war on terrorism. With their emergence as agents of commerce, drones can begin to reach their full Franklinian potential as cogs in the wheels of a growing economy whose end result, natch, is more tax revenue.

I found the following line in a Bloomberg.com report on Amazon’s drones chilling in its matter-of-fact description of the US practice of executing “suspected” terrorists, as if the practice of killing people based on mere suspicion was as unremarkable as dropping a new duvet cover from Amazon on someone’s front porch: “Experimentation with delivery by drones is part of a shift from the craft’s use by the U.S. military to spy on and kill suspected terrorists.” Jean Baudrillard once famously opined along the lines that the only real freedom left to us is what to purchase when we go shopping. But Baudrillard must not have read his Poor Richard’s Almanack, because in America, as demonstrated by our drones’ twin functions, we still have two choices: what to purchase and whom to kill. Taxes and death.

Amazon’s drones have a second implication which, unfortunately, will do little to lighten the mood. Delivery drones spell the demise of the delivery man or woman, thereby rendering the divorce between labor and consumption final. Until now, in getting one’s hot little hands on one’s new duvet cover from Amazon one had at the very least to encounter the physical presence of labor in the person of the UPS guy or gal, or, if nothing else, the specter of his or her presence lurking surreptitiously next to the package resting on your front porch. But with the advent of delivery drones, labor and consumption split off into parallel universes, and, henceforth, never the twain shall meet. But the divorce between labor and consumption only reinforces the marriage between death and taxes; Amazon’s drones can’t talk, but if they could they would surely ignore Asimov’s first law of robotics, “a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” and never tell us about the Chinese factory worker whose lungs are coated in the plastic she labors to produce for our new laptop.

Storks delivering newborn babies to our doorsteps have given way to drones delivering consumables, as the enchantment of myth gives way to the certainty of brute facts, none more brutal than the only two, per Franklin, that are never in doubt.