August 12th 2025

Your Dog May Stop Loving You

Lemon, 15 years old and counting, is what's known as a "working dog": she works hard to let everyone know, at all hours of the day, that she would like some more food.

None of us has ever lived a life without fire, and so none of us knows what a life without fire would be like. There was a time before fire though, when to distant ancestors trees in the middle of a lightning storm would sometimes turn orange and hot, then soft and black. Before fire was ours to wield, we would run from anything that burned. It then meant something different to us than fire does now.

Last month, I debuted Are We Trek Yet, a retro-futurist-skeuomorphic guide to the technologies that Star Trek has suggested over the last sixty years and the groups of people who are working to build them. I get excited imagining things like transporters and replicators and the long, prosperous, compassionate future that it's possible for us to build.

A Trekkie since I was in grade school, I felt a similar excitement when I learned that the estate of Gene Roddenberry shared Are We Trek Yet in a post on Facebook. It meant a lot to see my work next to that name, and it was a nice bonus that the post got the Bingeclock Discord a tiny influx of new and thoughtful members.

One of the new members, Bill Ghostbear, pointed out an omission that I had made in Are We Trek Yet: in the section on cybernetics, I had missed cochlear implants entirely. This omission would have been glaring enough because cochlear implants are so widespread compared to many of the other inventions I featured. There is another factor too though: my own mother has had a cochlear implant for a decade now, since losing her hearing through rapid degeneration in the 2000s.

My mistake got me thinking. It seemed like no coincidence that I had inadvertently omitted the piece of technology I come into contact with most in my life. I have gotten used to once again conversing with my mother as I had before she lost her hearing. (She's an excellent conversationalist.) I have gotten used to sending her YouTube Music links. (We both like the 60s rock of her youth.) This tiny miracle, which gave her back the life she knew, has all but disappeared into a background detail.

That's what the technology people love tends to do. It averts large tragedies, like a music lover never getting to hear another tune, and then skulks away before anyone notices. (To quote one of my favorite episodes of Futurama: “If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.”)

Of course, this dynamic works for better and for worse. For example, most of us are so close to our smartphones today that we lose ourselves in them frequently. We spend hours when we meant to spend minutes. We may not even conceptualize ourselves as engaging with our smartphones, but as engaging with the apps that are on it.

“I wasn't really on my smartphone, I was just checking that feed for a moment...”

New media will over the next decade take over even more parts of our lives than they have already. Most of those things, I leave for another day. They are important, but I believe the most important medium in any of our lives is not the VR headset, is not the AI-powered newsfeed, but is the humanoid robot that will in the short- to mid-term future join us in practically every space we inhabit. It will do our laundry. It will change our lightbulbs. It will plumb our toilets. It will make our meals. It will watch our children. It will watch our pets. It will make our children's meals and our pets' meals. It will do everything that we tell it to do, for as long as there is a demand for free time, for as long as there is something on Netflix more appealing than whatever the next chore may be.

It sounds wonderful; it sounds horrific.

Robin Williams and Hallie Eisenberg in Bicentennial Man.

Horrific because, the second-order effects will be many as broadly capable tools gradually take on larger swathes of every day. Consider this: by off-loading the tasks of feeding, walking, and petting your dog, at first "just this one time because I'm busy/tired" and then almost always, you will lose the bond that care-taking builds. Your dog won't adore you, once an all-powerful everything and now merely a roommate, with quite the same tail-wagging, salivating furor that today you likely take for granted. In short, your dog may stop loving you in the same way.

Now the robot's feeding the children. Now the robot's teaching them to read. This situation is preferable to one in which no one is teaching the children to read, which is a lot like the way it's preferable to have a social media feed to scroll through if there just aren't any books left in the world.

When my mom welled up hearing Elvis Presley sing for the first time in a decade, I couldn't have foreseen that the source of that wondrous gift would someday slip my mind altogether. Yet it did. I felt embarrassed! I had gotten so used to the cochlear implant that I had forgotten to be grateful for it. Not everything unpredictable about new technology is, sadly, going to be so pleasant as that.