It is cold again. Once again, our bodies need some warmth. Once again, when my friends and I go clubbing, we interlace our arms together, hoping to merge into a radiating multi-limbed creature. Summer has slipped away, and it is time to throw some anchors against the winds. Once again, I wonder what my friends think, not just of me, but in general. At the club, alone, how do they think; how do they feel the cold.

Hevel

Me and my roommate stand in front of a window and on the count of three, we exhale. Our breaths form different shapes on the glass. We trace them with our fingertips, trying to map out the topography of our soul.

In Hebrew, my father tongue, hevel – the word for mouth breath - also stands for a triviality, a frivolity - nonsense. It is also stands for Abel - son of Adam and Eve, killed by his brother Cain in the field, at the first murder. I think about this fratricide every time the air grows cold enough to fight back against our breaths, crystalising them for a fleeting second. Reminding us how damp and frail the living essence of us can be. Am I my brother’s keeper? So asks Cain when God asks him where his brother is. Often, in less dramatic occasions, I find that reflex in me and in the people around me. What do I owe this person? why am I responsible for hurting them? we find emotional legal loopholes fight back against guilt. In times like winter, when we walk home past people who are left to sleep in the cold, where families give up their heating to feed their children, in times in which we gather to watch football matched in stadium built upon the blood of construction workers, we should raise once again the question – what we owe each other. Should we be more, sincerely, our brothers’ keepers?

SatNav seduction

The day is damp with fog when me and my friends squeeze into a cab, our breathes stamping murky patterns on the windows. “On the roundabout turn left; then straight-ahead soldier” a profoundly seductive feminine voice beams from the microphone. We all laugh. “That is one sexy lady” laughs the guy on my right. It is not, it is a machine, it’s a programmed code, running fragmented, pre-recorded echoes of a preforming woman. But maybe so are all the sexy ladies we might think of, and the sexy lady in whose likeness they were all created. “You like this?” the cab driver laughs “wait to the end, that’s the best part – you’ll love it”. Me, who has heard many a men fail to deliver this promise, am prevented by experience from keeping my hopes up, but as we park, I still to make sure to attentively listen as the woman moans through the GPS “Can’t wait to ride again together soldier”. We can’t wait either, Mariah Carey knockoff, and that is very sweet of you. We laugh uncomfortably, thank the cab driver, and leave for our destination.

There is no need for another person anymore, we can ask to buy a product that also produces its own interaction with us and makes sure it is on our terms

But I keep thinking about how many times a day does a robot woman softly seduce me into minding the gap, not smoking, waiting on the telephonic queue – holding my patience just a little bit. Why are robots so often feminine? Why do they so often sound like early season Joan from Mad Man? What intimacy is supposed to be created between us and the abstract woman telling us the weather, telling us where the nearest pizza place is, leading our guided meditation?

If in the 19th century Marx pointed out the fetishism of commodity through which we viewed the relations between people as the relations between the products they produce, then maybe today this term has attained a new layer, as relations themselves have become a product. There is no need for another person anymore, we can ask to buy a product that also produces its own interaction with us and makes sure it is on our terms. And believing this product is a slightly flirtatious woman makes the average costumer (and designer) feel in control. This machine knows everything – for me, it serves me and it loves me. I do not see it as a threat.

Why are we afraid of robots?

My class enters this debate, as we observe AI poetry. My roommate, an avid lover of AI, wonders whether a computer could distinguish between AI and human poetry more than we do. We bet it can, we bet they can do anything, without the mess. Computers don’t procrastinate, don’t hesitate, don’t get bored – they calculate and know. They don’t sweat, don’t urinate, nor cry, their bodies seem to know what do to with the substance that they absorb, without the exterior embarrassment of filtering and disposing (this obviously not addressing actual liquids which you should keep far away from your machines).

We used to see all of those weaknesses as part of the wonderfully complex tapestry of the human, but what if, we are now terrified – they are just shortcomings of our race? Bugs in the coding of creation, no longer restrain AI minds from compiling smoothly. And maybe this is why we want the machines to be nice to us, giving them feminine voices to make sure that they remain in the traditionally feminine realm of secretaries, and maybe our misogyny shall hurt us in the end, when these modern Sirens seduce us to our dooms, but for now - we sail.