Saturday my wife and I drove through Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC. I don’t like driving at night and especially through jam-packed major cities. Thankfully we had “Shirley” with us. That’s the name we use for the voice of Google Maps. No matter how we do or whether we follow her exact instructions, Shirley always stays calm, consistent and…right.
At one point, Shirley said something we had never heard before. She suggested another direction; one that would save us five minutes. This new route took us off I-95 and through back roads way off the beaten path. We started thinking Shirley had finally got one wrong. But before we could even challenge her calculation, we were back on a major highway and five minutes closer to our destination.
We love Shirley. Wouldn’t travel without her.
But now there are Google’s self-driving cars, where drivers don’t even need to, well, drive. I wonder where that will leave our Shirley. Will she go the way of fax machines? A consolation prize: the original robotic vehicle created by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was named “Stanley.”
Google isn’t the only digital giant changing the cultural landscape. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, said last Sunday that Virtual Reality (or VR) would soon be the next big thing on social media.
“Pretty soon we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you’re just there, right there in person,” Zuckerberg said. “Imagine being able to sit in front of a campfire and hang out with friends anytime you want. Or being able to watch a movie in a private theater with your friends anytime you want. Imagine holding a group meeting or event anywhere in the world that you want. All these things are going to be possible.”
I like the way Zuckerberg talks about campfires and movies and friends. Makes VR sound more like a casual thing to do with people you like.
In the book Brave New World, author Aldous Huxley feared that the future would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. He feared that the truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance and we would become a trivial culture.
That was 85 years ago, when Charlie Chaplin starred in the landmark silent film, City Lights.
Things have changed quite a byt. Today’s digital revolution has made more technical advances in the past 10 years than, in many cases, all the years of past human history combined. This accelerated innovation is not only a way of life, but critical to serve the rapid growth of the world’s population.
I admit that I enjoy most new things, even though I tend to resist more as I get older, and might prefer campfires with no devices anywhere to be seen, heard or experienced. And who can’t help but notice all the people navel gazing today? We’re all busy staring at our own digital devices.
Is there anything “brave” about this new digital-everything world as Mr. Huxley opined? Is truth somehow getting lost in a digital sea of irrelevance? Do we live in a trivial culture? Do we talk and think about ourselves excessively because of an undue sense of self-importance?
I wonder what Shirley thinks.
“I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible, beautiful and soulful, rather than just give in to the digital age. But when I talk to people about this they just say, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ and stare at their mobiles.”
– Jack White