By Marie-Louise Meyers

Have you recently entered an office or a waiting room where everything

was changed and rearranged as if entering a new age of gleaming sterile

technology losing the comfortable feeling of having been there before.

You feel like a stranger in the land of Oz or should I say, AI,

where you are measured and weighed not for your human factors,

but in every other way as if your life depended on your score card,

the Healing Arts turned into speculative measures soon to be discharged.

measure by measure into a directory where Something else is in charge.  

You feel blind and deaf as if you’re being led into an illegible format,

handed a tablet instead of the usual forms to fill out by hand

with a stylus to perform the necessary marks as if reborn into another

more sanitized, no-touch age with a skeletal staff at best, hardly there to do the task before you though you seem clueless how to begin the task. 

Better bring someone younger with you more adept at the impersonal

mechanism to guide you through to the final page of endeavor.      

What is absent is the old comfortable feeling renewed you once had,

inviting a new century where AI has begun to permeate every aspect

of our lives.  The personal data is gradually changing abruptly into the impersonal under the auspices of new means of keeping books meaning your so-called permanent records after a year are destroyed.

Suddenly awakened, you have to start all over again as if a new patient.  

The only thing we can hope for is that behind the arsenal that awaits us

firing questions via a computer is a pervious human who ultimately cares about your heart and soul since you have come to them for their aid.  

Will empirical knowledge be totally replaced by scientific data?  

Will even the attitude of the patient figure into over-all assessment,

the human aspect prevail over all the unrelated and unparalleled details? 

Now assume you are elderly and no longer a rapid learner, and feel overwhelmed by the changes transpiring.  Will you be reduced to being an outlier to their fluid practice or need someone assigned to take up the cudgel for you leaving you feeling as if you’re out of the picture?  

When just getting around and dealing with the newly introduced pragmatic tools of living are difficult enough, how do you suddenly escalate

to the New Age without losing your way?  Is there a solution in the midst of these rapid changes, do you feel at a loss without a map to guide you if you 

are capable of reading the small nondescript print advising you?  How do you begin again to make a connection with every new invention when the old familiar strategies will be left behind.  Who will pick up the lost sheep left behind?  Will the costs sky rocket to support this new pervasive life form which promote these transitions which peak so you’re out on the street without the means looking for a hand-out to transport you through.  You can’t go back, you’re in a trap! Don’t say it won’t happen, it already has, the instruments of change invading every aspect of your life. 

Will the personal touch be lost like Mail no longer delivered to your door,

will newsworthy newspapers already disappearing be replace by what?

Perhaps the Senior Centers located in all parts of the country have to take on a new specialty instead of just revering memories of the past, 

making the elderly feel comfortable as they age, instead  paving the way for Seniors to embrace the No Touch Future!