Those goddamn touchless bathroom sensors, man. I mean, jeez Louise, those things are so freakin’ annoying.

I do my business on the porcelain and roll out a few squares of toilet paper. I tear them off, do my thing, toss them in — bam, I’m all good to go.

Then I see that black cube above the toilet, and I’m like, “Aw s—, man, really?” I pray that it’s one of the hybrid ones with the little silver button on top … but it never is.

I wave the back of my hand in front of it, but it doesn’t budge. I walk away and back again, trying to simulate another round. The sensor doesn’t fall for it. Those things are wicked smart. 

I guess I’m leaving a surprise for its next victim. 

I make my way to the sink, and oh, my god, there it is. No knobs. I look to my side, and there’s a soap dispenser — and no little gray handle to push in with the palm of my hand. Just a spout with that cupped-hand icon above it. Ugh.

I hold my hand under the icon and hear the machine buzzing, but nothing comes out. I’ve been blue-handed. 

I wave my hand under the sink nozzle, and water starts streaming down. A second later, it stops. Back and forth, it’ll go from Niagara Falls to a California summer without me even moving an inch. Those things have got minds of their own. 

When I entered the bathroom, my skin shimmered like a Georgia peach. My hair belonged to a Disney prince, and a pearly white smile painted my face. 

Now, I look in the mirror at the crooked and cracked reflection of what I’ve become.

After leaving a stinker in the stall and half-washing my hands, one final boss remains: the paper towel dispenser. 

I turn around to the opposite wall, and there it is. I’m in a Mexican standoff with that little blinking blue light under that little waving hand. 

At last, I cry to the heavens: “Bathroom sensors, are you flushin’ with me?”

Air Delights touchless bathroom sensors “are designed to provide a hands-free … experience, reducing the spread of germs and ensuring a cleaner environment.”

That is, if they ever worked. Bathroom sensors’ frequency of failure actually proves the hypocrisy of such a claim. According to the director of design engineering at Sloan Valve Company, which manufactures bathroom motion sensors, “The biggest problem (the company has) is maintenance … They scale up with lime and calcium.”

So, the reason we install bathroom sensors is to ensure a cleaner environment, but the reason they rarely work is that the environment isn’t clean? 

I will acknowledge that touchless sensors can be beneficial. A study from California State University revealed that some touchless faucet models can contribute to water savings of up to 54%.

Touchless sensors in bathrooms can also be helpful to elderly and disabled users, offering hands-free solutions to those who may be limited in motion or strength.

But these things are more dangerous than you think.

Many corporations and governments are taking a chainsaw to manual, human-touch tasks and replacing them with automation. There are now robots that make our beds for us. ChatGPT is free for college students for the remainder of the semester, advertising its ability to help devise to-do lists and study plans. The government is defunding libraries and firing park rangers.

These shortcuts propose to help humanity focus on “larger-scale” tasks like drilling for more oil.

However, it is these minuscule tasks that matter. As Navy SEAL Adm. William McRaven said about making your bed daily, “The little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right.”

The movements for accelerated STEM automation fail to acknowledge the importance of the little things. 

When I see Sloan motion sensors and vapes with digital touchscreens, I ask myself, “Are we automating things just to have more time to automate other things?”

I am eerily reminded of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ claim: The capitalist bourgeoisie cannot “exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

These “advancements” are also starting to eat away at our humanity.

Let’s turn to Reddit, where a user confesses, “Every piece of schoolwork, CHATGPT. I actually hate it but I feel like if I don’t use it my work will never be good enough and it makes me feel so unmotivated. The thing is too, I’m in advanced classes and everytime i’ve tried writing something on my own without the help of AI i get a bad grade or a less than satisfactory one and it really discourages me. I want to stop and start writing for myself again but I’m just scared, as stupid as it sounds.”

While ChatGPT is indeed a tool to reduce menial tasks and very well could outperform humans at tasks like writing essays and screenplays, we need to ask ourselves an important question: Why should it? 

These technological shortcuts are short-circuiting our motivation and self-confidence.

Do we want to live in a world where we don’t take time to “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free” because we’re too busy engineering ourselves to emotional extinction?

Allow your touchless bathroom adventures to serve as a microcosm of what could happen if we continue to automate seemingly menial tasks that require human touch and attention to detail.

Some of the major benefits of completing little tasks like making your bed or cleaning your room are boosted mood and physical health, increased productivity and anxiety relief. 

Maybe making a handwritten to-do list or pushing that little gray handle on the soap dispenser isn’t so bad after all. Maybe we shouldn’t replace jobs or tasks with automation for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of our humanity. 

I have a strange feeling that, if we continue down this path of ignorance and discouragement of human intervention, our brains and our world will soon be scaled up with lime and calcium.

We cannot let governments and corporations “drill, baby, drill” their accelerated STEM automation agendas through our skulls and flush down the very little things that make us human. 

Sloan, Sloan, leave us alone.

Alex is a freshman in Business.

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