Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them. 

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information. But they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and protect a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine and so we become more restricted in this fantasy. 

So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges. 

Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what's acceptable without facing the consequences of "real life." 

"Hello. You are you and I am I. We are people, also known as humans. This makes us different from most of the things on Earth." This fairly straightforward observation is the opening spread of Like, written by Annie Barrows. It establishes a somewhat odd yet matter-of-fact tone with a young boy addressing the reader.

Matters get more quizzical-or philosophical (哲学意义的), if you prefer—on the following spread, which carefully thinks about the ways in which people are different from one specific thing on Earth, "We are not at all like tin cans. We are not shaped like tin cans. We cannot hold tomato sauce like tin cans. If you open up our lids, nothing good happens. We are not at all like tin cans." The target audience will no doubt be amused, as was I, and perhaps reassured.

Like next matches people with the swimming pools, "We are a little bit more like a swimming pool than a tin can. We have water and chemicals and dirt inside us. But unlike a swimming pool we don't have people splashing around inside us." Mushrooms, we learn, differ from tin cans and swimming pools by being alive, and by growing and reproducing-human traits, too! Mushrooms, however, don't have mouths and brains. But wait: Hyenas have all that. They run around really fast, like we do... But hyenas don't say words. They don't tell stories. They don't get embarrassed, even when they're caught eating something off the ground.

Where to go from there? "Look at all these people, the text exclaims over the illustration full of people of seemingly every size, shape, color, age and means of mobility. They are not exactly like us. But they are more like us than they are different."

"I am more like you than I am like most of the things on Earth, the narrator concludes. I'm glad. I'd rather be like you than a mushroom-an appealing and inarguable understanding."

The iPhone has become a usability nightmare (噩梦). A new one comes with 38 preinstalled (提前装好的) apps, of which you can delete 27. Once you've downloaded your favorite apps, you're now sitting at 46 or more.

Like many companies, Apple has decided that there's no need to build an easy-to-use product when it can use artificial intelligence. If you want to find something in their garbage dump of apps and options, you must use Spotlight, Apple's AI-powered search engine that can find almost everything there.

This "innovation" of artificial intelligence is not the creation of something new but simply companies selling you back basic usability after decades of messy design choices. And these tech firms are charging us more to fix their mistakes and slapping an AI label as a solution.

Alexa and Siri have become replacements for intentional computing. They give commands into voice interfaces (接口) easily but sacrifice "what we can do" to "what Amazon or Apple allows us to do." We have been trained to keep apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any easy way to organize them. They have decided that disorganized chaos is fine as long as they can provide an automated search product to sift (筛查) through the mess, something more tech, even if tech created the problem in the first place.

Artificial intelligence-based user interfaces rob the user of choice and empower tech giants to control their decision-making. When one searches for something in Siri or Alexa, Apple and Amazon control the results. Google already provides vastly different search results based on your location, and has redesigned search itself multiple times to trick users into clicking links that benefit Google in some way.

Depressingly, our future is becoming one where we must choose between asking an artificial intelligence for help, or fighting through an ever-increasing amount of poorly designed menus in the hope we might be able to help ourselves. We, as consumers, should demand more from the companies that have turned our digital lives into trillion-dollar enterprises.