In the future, perhaps we’ll all be wizards.

Brad discovered the Ambient Umbrella, which glows when rain or snow is in the forecast, reminding you to take it along.  Version 2 will actually levitate as you walk towards the door and groan “doooon’t forget meeee … it’s quite likely to raaaaain …” in a low british accent.  Less than 100 years ago, showing someone a product like this would get your burned at the stake for witchcraft.  Humankind is progressing in so many ways.

Do products like this — which pay attention to things like the weather forecast so that we don’t have to — make us dumber because they do the thinking for us, or make us smarter because our brains aren’t occupied by mundane things like rain falling? 

They certainly make us less prone to planning.  When’s the last time someone with a navigation system looked up directions?  Just get in and go.  Even if the nav system fails, you’ve always got more technology — a mobile phone — to back you up.

Personally, I love technology.  I love tools and gadgets, and I rely on them to maintain a degree of sanity and happiness in life.  I also love to go camping now and then and get away from all of it — in part maybe to prove to myself that I can still survive without any of it.

I’m fearful of two things:

  1. Future generations being overly dependent on technology to not just be happy, but be functional and thoughtful (in the basic sense of the word).  Let’s hope the folks at Ambient never have to add a rain detector feature that calls out “Hey, dummy, it’s raining.  Open me.”
  2. The degree of that dependence will be underestimated until something happens to the underlying infrastructure and everything stops working.

I hate to drop in a doomsday scenario so early in the days of this blog.  This is far from a prediction, just a little reminder (to myself?) to enjoy the technology but still catch an episode of Survivorman now and then for pointers (or is Man vs. Wild better?  I haven’t decided).

Gotta go close my car windows — my big toe is throbbing, which means it’s going to rain.