Robots had never fascinated me until I saw one coming toward me the other day. Having coffee at a Starbucks that shares space with a Mitsubishi Motors showroom, a yellow, two-armed, round-headed hunk of metal started rolling my way until it stopped to inspect some people.

Curious, I walked up to it while a young girl asked the robot for the time. The robot replied and the young girl looked at me. I showed her my watch and she was impressed that the robot was correct. Then the girl walked away and I returned to my seat.

There the robot stood, at a loss, alone, without any tasks or stimulus nearby. I started wondering whether robots had feelings. If they could be programmed to communicate and react, what does the artificial intelligence do when there is nothing to communicate and nothing to react to?

Searching the Internet, I learned that the robot is called Wakamaru and made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. Thoughts of robots made for war (which exist in the form of U.S. military drones) by a company that used to build weapons of war for Japan troubled me. Perhaps even cute robots like Wakamaru will be programmed to kill one day.

But this philosophizing and fascination gave way to an awesome feeling: I was glimpsing the far future, where mankind may one day be controlled by robots, in the sense that the robots may be a necessity rooted in daily life. If we cannot do something without a robot, then we are slaves to it.

The robot needs electricity and in contemporary life it seems we are slaves to electricity as well. A couple of decades ago, I wouldn't be typing this column on a computer nor would the photograph above have been taken by a cell-phone camera.

Can we do away with computers or cell phones? Can we live without e-mail, television, indoor lighting, air conditioning?

Before coming to Japan in 2002, I never had a cell phone. I carry it with me every day but I am trying to wean myself from the habit. I have started turning the cell phone off when I go to bed.

As for e-mail, I have a hard time replying quickly or even within a month because I feel that even an e-mail is a letter and letter writing should take time. A letter should be well thought out, with correct grammar, punctuation, a message.

Over a summer vacation during college, I wrote letters to a friend, who commented that we were trying to "revive the lost art of letter writing." There was nothing electric to it, nothing digital, including the die-cut, moistened stamps that adorned the envelopes. Pen and paper, thought and ideas, reason or folly, it was and is the only form of communication that could compare with visiting and talking with a friend. The phone is too quick, especially for images and ideas to form — truly "in one ear and out the other."

The tactile, tangible letter could be saved, reread, digested. A suitable response could only come from taking time to sit down and write.

These days, I've been writing letters to a friend in Singapore, though our frequency has been diminishing. However, the effort to find liberation from e-mail, from being bound to a computer, from being tied to the electrical grid, has a satisfying aspect.

I can do without robots. Perhaps this is why I wear a windup, automatic watch.

E-mail: yung@ml.japantimes.co.jp