Death by Machine


I go to batting cages about once every two years. I don't have much natural skill at baseball, but there's something healthy about smashing things with a bat once in awhile. Though I rarely make the trip, twice in my life I've seen these pitching machines malfunction. Instead of pitching only 10 or 15 balls for $.50, the machine gets stuck in pitch mode. It won't let up. You lose count, swinging as hard as you can pitch after pitch until a teen employee saunters over and turns off the malfunctioning machine. The first time it happened to my dad during a trip to Door County, and he stood in there batting for so long that he had a hard time with the car door. It happened to me several years later in Minneapolis, and I stayed in hitting as hard as I could even though my friends were yelling at me that it was their turn. This is what it will look like if computers ever need to wage war on mankind. They won't design some terminator killing robot or farm us as human batteries. They'll let us kill ourselves with free stuff.

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