Владелец осликов осознал, что машина требует от него больше подчинения, чем его питомцы

Announcement: I have successfully trained Ollie to perform the following trick. Each morning, he comes to stand with his head by my right hand, lowered to the perfect height for easy behind-the-ears scratching. He remains still for approximately five seconds, then takes a small step forward, so the scratching hand is now a bit further down his neck and so onward to the withers. He proceeds in this step-wise fashion in order to receive blessed itch relief all along the hard-to-reach line traced by his classic donkey cross. Finally, he pauses for extra scratch time just above the tail, swishes said tail and ambles off to graze. Another interpretation is that Ollie has trained me to reliably deliver a good back scratch session on demand by placing himself in a certain position and then following a certain protocol. Either way, I’m proud of us — of Ollie for silently speaking up for himself and of me for listening. This new routine seemed to simply emerge organically, a new step in the quiet dance of growing trust between us. In contrast, my car is having an extremely hard time training me in the simplest of tasks: clicking into my seat belt before I turn on the engine. Every time I start the car, it beeps obnoxiously until I buckle up. If only my lizard brain could only process this inevitability and act accordingly — “Susan, sit down and buckle your seat belt and then press start” — I would be spared the beeps. And I hate them, those beeps. So generically irritating. All the things they could mean: The refrigerator door is open! The microwave is done doing whatever magic thing it does! The toast is toast! Partly this is a problem of unlearning. Back when cars needed a minute to warm up, and before they had started hectoring us about our driving like nervous passengers, it made sense to turn the engine on first. I was 16 years old when I committed to this order of operations, and it seems to be hard-wired. But mostly, it’s a problem of communication that only goes one way — no discussion, no evolution. My car just beeps at me. I cannot make it not beep, except by doing what it asks. It gets my back up. This is bullying. After all, I’m the human, and my Camry is an insensate machine — for now. (I can tell the coming “all-AI all the time world” is going to be a rough ride for me.) Meanwhile, Ollie and I are on an unmapped journey of deepening understanding and affection. He brays in welcome when I come out to the barn, he silently approaches for our scratch session and he never, ever beeps. While Ollie has lived here for years, our relationship is changing quite rapidly this summer, as it is with the other equids. In part, this seems to stem from my efforts to slow down and pay attention — not just in the barn but in general. I’m finding that practicing empathy leads in strange directions. One small, slimy example: the other morning while drinking my coffee and looking out the window, I saw a little slug tangled in a small spider web stretched across one of the window panes. It twisted and curled, striving to get free and slowly winning the fight, pulling the web down towards the sill. So there I sat, sipping coffee and rooting for a slug, even finding it kind of cute with its little horns. Back in the barn, I no longer approach the daily application of fly repellent to the donkeys’ legs as that last chore to hurry through before coffee No. 2. Now, it’s a chance to give each slender donkey leg a massage. Oates, who used to try to run away when he saw me coming with the jar, now walks up and butt-nudges Ollie out of the way so he can go first. They are happy and I am amused, and it probably takes less time now than when I hurried. Recently, after getting briefly sucked into a whirlpool of online snark about something I have since forgotten, I was struck by how strange it is that the word “tool” has become such a diss; that to be a tool is to be weak, to behave without dignity or strength, somehow shameful. This meaning — the tool as a pawn, a fool used by others for their own ends — goes back to the 1660s according to one of my favorite websites, etymonline.com. (Its other derogatory meaning, as slang for a particular masculine body part that will go unnamed here, is even older, first appearing in the 1550s.) Certainly, I object to being made to feel like a tool by my own car. But I wonder why we are so afraid of being seen to be of service, to be responsive to the needs of others, to be helping without expectations. In this moment of change, is our fear of being seen as weak making us stronger, or is it making us weaker? Is a successful herd made up entirely of boss mares and dictator donkeys?