what if we don’t need humans anymore?- paradigm shift

I woke up with a weird pit in my stomach today thinking if we really needed humans all this while. Wait, I thought we were supposed to just do physical distancing but this all ended up in “social” distancing. Its hardly been two to three months into this new paradigm and I am already feeling that we don’t need humans anymore. Couple of things first: 1) I do not want to bother humans much as everyone is going through a huge shift in their life just like me; 2) I am just so filled with technology in my life that I am missing myself in my own space; and 3) I am getting very creative in thinking how materialistic things around me are “more lively” than I ever thought. With that third point, you might be thinking I am losing my mind, but I am just being creative as I anthropomorphise everything in my life. My plants are hugged/kissed, my kitchen utensils are played with, my paper and pencil are made to fall in a relationship (Cupid me!), and so on.

But I really woke up to sketch how the future of HCI might be about we just being “OKAY” with having relationships with technology and this is bigger than human evolution ever taught us. This is not a new concept. Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his voice assistant in HER. Anything can happen in this world filled with technology. The main question is how ready are we as humans to accept that fact and how “soon” are we going to become comfortable with this fact?

I am just waiting for how COVID-19 time, although sad, is going to bring in so many design implications and innovations in this world. Just trying to be optimistic in this clueless world.