I have this favorite quote which dates back more years than I care to remember. It is from a comedy troupe named “Firesign Theatre” off of their 1971 albumtitled I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus. In it the hero, named Clem, is blasted into a future so confusing that at one point he is consoled by another character. He is told that “Living in the Future is a lot like living with bees in your head; but there they are.” Remember, this was 1971, the Future hadn’t even happened yet. But somehow they knew. I should have listened more closely back then because, let me tell you, today my head is buzzing.

This past weekend I ran full tilt and smacked my apis-laden cranium solidly against Arthur Clarke’s Third Law which states :“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Then, I stepped back from this logical precipice and took another crack at it.

This is mostly my own fault. Had I not left the country and spent several years idling around the Caribbean I would have known all this was happening. Besides, I was only gone two years. I mean, really now, how much could actually change? The answer was: a lot. The big things were still pretty much the same but it was down in the details where things got interesting. Down in the details, where the Devil lives.

It seems to me that, unannounced and in my absence, things that used to be things are quickly becoming beings. They are borderline alive.

Take cars for example. In the olden days you opened your car door with a key, started your car with a key, and got access to the truck – or boot if you prefer – with a key. It worked perfectly fine. Some cars had one key, some had two but whether or not you were driving  your own car, one that you had rented, or one that you had stolen the keys to, it was a pretty straightforward process. Key, open, start, drive. Then, during the Unnecessary Convenience Revolution of the late Twentieth Century, the driver’s experience was enhanced with remote keyless entry! Ooooh! This allowed you to merely press a button and the door locks would operate! The main drawback of these early systems was that you had to put something on your keychain that was about the size and weight of a main battle tank. The punch line of the joke became “or do you have remote keyless entry?” instead of “or are you happy to see me?”

Time progressed and the remote features were incorporated into the key itself (I particularly like the switchblade key for Volkswagens) so there was only one thing required to get into your car, start it, set the alarm, open the trunk – or boot if you prefer , or set off the panic siren. Which brings us up to the present. Now, it seems, they’re doing away with the key.

I have had experience with two such keyless systems, one on a Beemer and one on a humble Toyota. The BMW has a device that makes you believe you’re still the one in control. It’s like a little USB stick with buttons to work the doors. When you want to start the car you put the stick into a slot in the dash and push a start button. See, you can say to yourself, it’s just a fancy key. Toyota has left no such illusions. There are still buttons but basically the car operates because you’re there and the car knows.

This experience came to me this past weekend when a friend picked me up to go sailing on another friend’s boat. As a long-time boat owner I had often heard the saying “the second best thing is owning a boat”. I can now state for a fact that this is true. The best thing is having a friend who owns a boat. But I digress. My friend with the car picked me up on her way to the marina. She tossed me what I thought was the old-fashioned remote keyless entry fob and said “Here, you drive.” I got in the left seat, looked at the controls and said “OK, gimme the key.” “There isn’t one. Just push that button,” she pointed, “and wait ‘til it says ‘Ready’.” Cool. I put my hands on the wheel, dropped the tranny into “D” and off we went. Which is when you start to realize that you are no longer in a car, you are driving a computer with wheels.

The first clue is that the dashboard is dominated by a large screen surrounded by buttons. Lots and lots of buttons. None of which has anything to do with car-ish things. Instead, you see words like “Map” and “Info” and “Setup” and “Dest”. Opposite these are a line of buttons clearly intended to work a stereo, however no stereo is evident. But when you fire this baby up and the ToyotaHybridSynergyGelatoWaffleCone Drive technology is brought to bear then it all becomes clear. 

The sole purpose of this vehicle is to get you into an accident.

The massive display glows to life and says something along the lines of “WARNING: Using the map and other displays on this screen while driving will cause an accident and you will most likely DIE! Press Continue if you’re OK with this.” There isn’t a “Don’t Continue” button. The thing is, pretty much anything you touch, from the brake pedal to the switch for the light on the vanity mirror, is interpreted by the car as “Continue” . Once pressed the screen displays a GPS driven navigation system that puts the one on the Space Shuttle to shame. If you go into reverse it switches to a license-plate-eye view of the car you’re about to run into. It’s also the radio, car info, and – the most distracting thing since Dancing With the Stars – the ToyotaHybridSynergyGelatoWaffleCone technology Energy Management Display. This is basically a cartoon representation of the power components of the vehicle’s drive train and which way, at any given instant, the electrons are flowing. I could lose myself for hours. On top of all that the car is watching you. When you arrive at your destination and shut it down you are given an “Eco-Drive” score showing you how sustainable, or in my case unsustainable, a driver you are. Talk about performance anxiety.

That evening after sailing and dinner out I found myself alone with the car, the “key” and a beautiful clear Seattle night sky. Typical. I was walking about enjoying the stars and I approached the car. The light inside glowed. Ooooohhhh…I walked away, the car darkened. Then came back, it glowed again. My friend returned.

“Hey, check this out.” I demonstrated. 

“Yeah, whatever. If you walk up to the trunk you can open it. Same with the doors. The only reason it starts is because it knows you and the ‘key’ are inside.” 

“You don’t need the buttons?” I was crestfallen.

“Nah, the car just knows.”

The ToyotaHybridSynergyGelatoWaffleCone Drive whisked us silently through the night. As we drove the screen was playing a catchy salsa number. There was no CD, no radio station, no Sirius/XM, no USB stick, iPod, nor cassette, 8-track, or 33 1/3 RMP vinyl disk. 

“Where’s the music coming from?” 

“Pandora, on my iPhone.” 

“Cool.” 

“By the way, your website doesn’t work on my iPhone.” 

I was overjoyed. This was the first unforced admission that anybody was actually reading my stuff. However, being a concerned content provider, I immediately looked into the issue. There was a problem to solve. Long story short, it turns out that the Safari browser that comes on iStuff is not quite the same Safari for Macs and Windows. It doesn’t have scroll bars so when text gets truncated in a frame there is no way to just scroll down and look at the rest. But, I found, Apple anticipated this problem and offers what is called a “two-finger scroll”. Basically, sliding one finger up and down on an iStuff screen scrolls the whole page while putting two fingers side-by-side on the truncated frame and moving them scrolls only that frame. Simple enough, it works, but is not particularly intuitive.  For you non-iStuff mobile readers, the bad news is that Google does not – even though they’ve known about the problem for a couple of years – offer a similar function. So far, the only workaround that I’ve found is to use the Firefox mobile browser for Android instead of Android’s native Chrome browser. Sorry. Chalk up another one for Steve Jobs.

While I was looking into the display issue I found myself browsing through the Apple iOS user guide to find information on scrolling. I learned way too much. The entire manual is not about how you use iStuff but how, by touching the screen, you communicate with it. 

Here are just some of ways to talk with it: tap, double-tap, triple-tap, plusvarious taps using one-to-four fingers, a four-finger-tap at the top of the screen does something different than one at the bottom, you can “flick” with one or more fingers and do it up or down or right or left, there’s a “scrub” movement, a pinch movement – open or close, and there are split-taps whereby you tap with one finger then tap again with a different finger. Don’t ask me how it knows. Unbelievably, there is a “rotor” which is an invisible dial you can turn to change how all the other controls behave. But, the controls that are affected depend on what you’re doing with the iStuff at the time. All-in-all, my brief foray into iLand  introduced me to some thirty different individual hand motions some of which can be combined into sequences that perform a single task. It looks like magic, but I believe the technical term is communication.

This effort in communicating, which is about the same level-of-effort as learning the alphabet and numbers for American Sign Language, is just so you can talk to your phone.

I am reminded of a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey in which astronaut Dave Bowman and HAL (IBM minus one, get it?) the computer have the following exchange:

“Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”

“What’s the problem, HAL?”

“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do, Dave.”

Now, ten years after 2001, the problem is that cars and phones require multiple advanced degrees just to call down to Luigi’s for a pizza and then go pick it up. If you accidentally left your iPhone in your eCar when you went into Luigi’s, they’d both be gone and heading to Vegas by the time you got back. And they’d be laughing all the way.