A Family Tradition of Defying the Machina Automa

In the cozy atmosphere of these first days of 2026, as the world feverishly debates super intelligent AI systems destined to decide the fate of humanity, I find myself sitting here pondering a very practical question: whether my brain has suffered a serious system error. I have always considered myself a lover of modernity, someone who holds the latest iPhone, scrolls through Facebook several hours a day, and lives fully in the digital age, yet deep in my soul, I absolutely do not believe that AI can write or teach worth a damn. This is not a sudden prejudice, but rather a form of ancestral faith, carefully encoded into my family DNA through many generations within a lineage famously known for its deep seated suspicion of all soulless machinery.

My great great grandfather, according to family lore, would rather walk until his feet swelled, or ride a horse or a slow ox cart, than ever set foot on a bicycle. His reasoning was concise and steely. He believed a bicycle was a freakish thing that did not eat grass or breathe and certainly possessed no loyalty like a living animal. To entrust one’s life to a two wheeled iron frame was, in his view, an act of gross irresponsibility toward the spirit of movement. This spirit was inherited and expanded upon by my great grandfather in the culinary realm, where he rejected the first electric rice cooker with all the solemnity of a sacred ritual. To him, cooking rice was a holy dialogue between human, fire, and water, where the scent of straw smoke blending into fresh rice created its true essence, whereas the electric cooker produced only pale, soulless grains devoid of the cook’s memory.

By my grandfather’s generation, the technological front moved to the laundry room, where he held an absolute belief that clothes were only truly clean when scrubbed with bare hands on a wooden washboard, because only human fingertips knew where to apply pressure and where to be gentle. My father continued this war at the kitchen sink, asserting as firmly as a nail driven into wood that only hand washing could make dishes squeaky clean, while the dishwasher was merely a money wasting gimmick that could never truly wash away the stubborn stains of life.

However, that rock solid tradition is now facing the threat of a complete rupture caused by my son, who is a rebel and has boldly declared that he has no need to learn how to drive because AI powered cars can now take the wheel themselves. Watching him eagerly trust a mindless algorithm to safeguard his life on the streets makes me shudder, much like my great great grandfather must have felt looking at a bicycle, because to me, a car without the breath of a human driver is nothing more than a mobile coffin powered by lines of code.


Having grown up within such a remarkably consistent ideology, I realize that I am still the upgraded version of my clan by steadfastly maintaining that AI is merely a machine for sautéing data, with no heart and no memory, that can never replace a true teacher or writer. Therefore, on the occasion of the New Year, I would like to send a playful reminder to be vigilant and not be so easily swayed by those eloquently lecturing on AI ethics or enthusiastically guiding you on how to use AI effectively. Those words may sound profound, but they are likely just an attempt to impose a new faith in machines, which, according to my family DNA, are inherently untrustworthy.

If you still have doubts, you should try asking those very AI models whether you should trust those tech missionaries, and you will surely receive a roundabout, evasive answer lacking that ultimate human sincerity. This New Year, instead of letting waves of propaganda blind us, perhaps we should preserve a bit of our charming family traditions to protect our unique selves, by keeping faith in the sensation of our hands and the creativity of the human mind, which are things that, while they may not eat grass, should never be empowered to replace both the grass and the people.



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