I just wait that instead of the rider I get a robot, so I don’t have to open the door pretending to be kind or not to be surprised that he arrived on time (which then paradoxically I would be kinder with the robot simply because it is a robot and not a thirty year old who hates that job and therefore also me). Know that on 10 August 2025, in Shenzhen, China, they inaugurated the first shopping center entirely managed by machines. Barists who prepare the coffee with the exact temperature you have ordered, without raising an eyebrow if you want it lukewarm, to the glass, large in the small cup, cold stained, hot stained (the variability of Italian demands for coffee would send even Cahill, the impassive coach of Sinner). Or shop assistants who do not squanded you from top to bottom if you ask the third time where the stylus batteries are. O waiters who do not say “good day” with that tone that makes you understand that they hope they will never see you again.
By the way, on the same day, in Beijing, a restaurant has decided to transform the service into a futuristic show: humanoids that cook pancakes while acting poems of the tang dynasty (they will do it every now and then I hope, otherwise they become like the Roman storytellers to whom from the money as long as they go to your table, only that a robot of the money that cares), and robot bartends Musical movements and robots dinosaurs that walk through the tables without apparent reason if not to remember that you are in the future and that the future also has its absurdities.
Meanwhile, in England the Ocado company has just presented the strengthening of its automated warehouses: mechanical arms “On-Grid Robotic Pick” that pack the expense with a delicacy that a human perhaps reserves only for an Ming vase. No distracted clerks that crush the bread under the bottles of water, only algorithms that have each article based on millimeter stones.
Also in August, the founder of the Unitree Chinese announced that within one or two years he will arrive what he calls the “chatgpt moment” of robotics: machines capable of entering an environment never seen before, orienting himself, understanding the context and, for example, bringing you a beer without you should even explain where you keep the fridge (on the forecasts, let’s always be cautious, we saw it after the altman advertisement on chatgpt5 ” atomic bomb “).
In the United States, however, already from 9 August 2025, in Maryland, Parker is operational, a robot-political designed to monitor parking lots. It does not use facial recognition, they say: records plates and videos with alternate zeal on the first day of school, and it is not clear if Parker makes fines or limits you to observe you (from what I understand I think it can go from one function to the other function based on the mood of its software).
All this to say that, in the midst of all this automation, I could leave the house. Not to meet people, of course (we do not exaggerate) but to see a robot that I need the shopping in person. Or better yet, stay at home and make her deliver by a non -angry android for her work that does not look at me badly and does not expect me to smile.
Also because now, every time someone asks me “how are you?”, I reply with the verse of Under Pressure: “That’s the terror of knowing what this world is about, Watchin ‘Some good Friend Screaming Let Me Out!” And almost nobody understands, they take me for mad. I am sure that a robot, on the other hand, would put the base to me and even a built -in microphone would put me.