The vanishing personal space conundrum solved!

 I am not entirely comfortable in large gatherings even though I occasionally attend them.  In fact, I don’t think you will ever spot me marching in any kind of mass assemblies, peaceful or not.

Don’t get me wrong when I say this.  I can sit comfortably in church, or an occasional sporting event and behave myself, it’s just that I would rather walk down a lonely trail in the woods, far away from any other human being or musical delivery device. In fact, I have walked for hours not hearing another human voice and was perfectly at peace and content.  Did you know that when you spend hours alone, you become very quiet?  My doggies sleep when my bride is away, because the house becomes silent, except for my constant pecking of the keyboard.

My dad once said he “enjoyed his own company” and I learned to understand this peculiar sounding confession. He would go off in his 18-foot boat and spend the day catching redfish and speckled trout and come back and clean them at his house in Aransas Pass.  He didn’t even listen to the radio.  I don’t think he was uncomfortable around other people; he just loved the freedom to make all his own choices and he got it in that boat out on the water.

As technology shrinks our privacy and let me say up front that I embrace much of it, the need to get away from it all amplifies exponentially.  Angie Middleton explained to me that a friend owns a car that spoke to her while driving.  It told her to “keep your eyes on the road”.  It’s scary on one hand and much needed by some on the other.  I do believe we are going to see a massive shift in technology very soon that will be overwhelming to most of us, me included.

The famed British theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking recently threw up the same red flag as the Unibomber Ted Kaczynski, in that "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." 

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded" is another quote by him.  This, of course caught my eye, as I follow the (AI) artificial intelligence movement and have read a number of books by a leader in AI, Ray Kurzweil.  The real kicker here is this is happening right now.  We will see this in our lifetime and that once again brings us back to the original intent of this column: personal space.

Our personal space or comfort zone is shrinking, right along with our ability to control what little we still have.  Baytown is a good example of how little personal space we have.  Get in your car and drive onto any of our roads.  The only space you control is around you inside the car and that’s about it.  Everywhere you look are trucks and cars with lots and lots of people.  Inside almost any store you have to move out of someone’s way.  You stand in line.  You wait, due to the movement of people.  You are crowded and if you are like me, impatient.

Maybe that’s why I like to hike the trails or launch my kayak on one of our waterways.  Maybe I feel claustrophobic in the crowds or maybe I just don’t like to conform.  I don’t know and frankly, I don’t care; all I know is I don’t like the crowds.  Now, according to Angie, Ted, Ray, and Stephen, I won’t even be able to get away from technology, especially inside my own danged car.

I guess I could attempt to go off the grid, but I like my air conditioning and Food Town’s close proximity; besides gardening is danged hard work and rabbits are a poor substitute for prepared boudain, chicken fried steak, and gumbo.  I’m afraid I, we, us… are caught in an inescapable vortex of people and technology and like lumbering lemmings scurrying toward our own destruction; we’ll ultimately gallop to our own demise.

Of course we will not go empty-handed.  I wouldn’t suggest that.  In one hand we’ll have the latest 5G Smartphone or tablet and in the other a sack of rapidly prepared convenience food.  We won’t actually run either.  We’ll be driven to the cliff’s edge in our environmentally correct ‘smart” car or faux-SUV.  We won’t have to worry about criminals because all of us will be armed.  Drunk or distracted driving will be eliminated because our cars will go wherever we tell them, or just take us to the nearest de-tox center by law.  They’ll monitor our sugar levels and automatically send the results to our doctor.  A drone will deliver our meds when our house signals we are home and our universal insurance will deduct the credits from our account.

If by chance you can find a place to hike off the grid, an amber alert will automatically go out and a platoon of camera heavy quadcopters will home in on the last place you were known to be.  When you are located, your account will be billed for not securing a permit from Homeland Security to go off-grid.  It will be “for the good of the people” that everyone is accounted for and by golly, for safeties sake, we will agree to it.

Doom and gloom you say?  Nope, just acceptable social acclimation and the snuffing out of personal space – for the good of the people.

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Is Google the Anti-Christ?

Note:  This column is linked to many current philosophies and by-phrases being implemented in our country by progressives and our government.

Forgive me for going geek this week in my column, if you can.  I am a nerd, who hides it well most of the time, often posing as an outdoorsman who loves the woods.  If sci-fi, computers and robots are not your cup of tea, please do not stop reading.  Please listen to me on this futuristic environment we are flying into with apparent abandon and with welcoming arms.

What?  You say you are not in this group?  You say you are still old school and read a real newspaper that is thrown on your lawn and this proves you still like the old ways, right?  Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but what we discriminating papyrus readers see as normal, the current and future generations will see as antiquated and frankly, a waste of renewable resources.  An eTablet reader is acceptably sustainable while pulp-based reading is wasteful – and eventually even… sinful.

No, not sinful!  Wasting resources will become criminal, like smoking tobacco…   What?  Smoking tobacco isn’t against the law.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1763477/e-reader-ownership-doubles-surges-ahead-tablet-adoption

No, not yet, but for the good of the people, it will be.  It’s inherently unhealthy and everyone has been drilled ad nauseam that second-hand smoke is more dangerous than the actual drag off the cigarette, right?  How we’ve collectively inhaled that dubious fact is beyond even kindergarten logic
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Never doubt how powerful the written word is and when you add a seasoned orator like our current top executive, it becomes exponentially powerful.  The man could sell Edsel, Yugo, Pinto and Corvair cars and people would line up to buy them.  Why?  Because he has a team of fantastic speech writers and his delivery is convincing, even if most of us reasoning folks can see it is nothing more than political smoke-blowing rhetoric.

Enter Google.  Google changed everything for most of us.  Back 20 or so years ago AOL had the Internet by the throat and most people gladly paid to use it.  I, like almost every computer geek I’ve known thought it was stupid and worked the Internet without it.  I used Netscape to browse and Eudora as an email client.  Netscape morphed into Firefox and I still use this fine and free open-source browser and thumb my nose at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  Okay, okay, I’m getting geeky, but for a reason.

Google introduced Gmail and blam!  I was on it.  No more AOL,Outlook or Yahoo folders for my email.  No more sorting and cataloging.  Google is a search engine and so is Gmail, so I archive my messages and then when I want to find one, I simply type in the person’s name that sent it or a catchy word and there it is.  Literally everything Google has done has made my surfing the net better, but about three years ago, I sat up and took a look at what was happening and that is when I half-jokingly predicted that Google may just be the Anti-Christ.

BigDog - The Most Advanced Rough-Terrain Robot on Earth

Now, with their acquisition of Boston Dynamics (Google it!), I’m feeling the hackles beginning to rise.  This military grade robotics company first came to my attention about five years ago when I watched a video of their robotic Big Dog jump over a section of ground, then walk across ice, cinder blocks, and deep snow without falling down – and that was five years ago!  It could carry 350 pounds while doing it too.

Now, back in the ancient days, required reading for college included Ray Bradbury’s incredible book, Fahrenheit 451, which I’ve read maybe 3 times.  In this book, the protagonist fears one thing more than anything else – a mechanical dog that once it is on your scent, it never ceases to stop looking for and killing whatever it is looking for.  His lone crime was reading books.  Books were outlawed and he had 20 of them.

Boston Dynamics also has a robotic animal called “Cheetah” which has been clocked running almost 30 miles an hour and an 11 pound robotic sand flea which can jump 30 feet straight up in the air.  How would you like to have one of those weapons land on your head?  Bear in mind that these are military grade robots which could be used against “terrorists” both domestic and foreign.

It’s been reported this is the 8th robotic company Google has bought in 6 months and with their collective brain-power and inexhaustible revenue, they are more powerful than many nations.  Add in Ray Kurzweil’s terrifying vision he dubs The Singularity where artificial intelligence surpasses humans in 2045 and you have The Terminator.  Oh, so you think it can’t happen?  It can and Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robots won’t protect us.

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google.

I may be wrong – I hope I am.  I hope these advances will be used “for the good of the people” as much as I hate that mantra and not against us, but power is a heady drink and with the global environment becoming more and more unified, I can see nothing good coming from a lot of this technology.
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