Where Do I Go Now?

2017-10-25

Manoush is a nice human being. Polite, punctual, present. But man, is she a rude robot. Recently, Manoush attended a conference as a telepresence robot. (Imagine an iPad, on top of two brooms, with a Roomba as the base.) And she careened around interrupting conversations, sideswiping people and disrupting panels. Literally an out-of-body experience. We lose track of our bodies every day now. We spiral into some Instagram stalking mid-commute and bump into someone on the street. We surface from a te...

Manoush is a nice human being. Polite, punctual, present. But man, is she a rude robot.

Recently, Manoush attended a conference as a telepresence robot. (Imagine an iPad, on top of two brooms, with a Roomba as the base.) And she careened around interrupting conversations, sideswiping people and disrupting panels. Literally an out-of-body experience.

We lose track of our bodies every day now. We spiral into some Instagram stalking mid-commute and bump into someone on the street. We surface from a text at dinner to a peeved friend, still waiting the end of our sentence. We follow the blue ribbon of our GPS right off a cliff.

This week, the big and small ways we’ve put ourselves on autopilot. What we gain, and what we’ve lost. Because there was a time when humans were guided by the stars, not the satellites.

With researchers Allen Lin, Johannes Schöning, and Brent Hecht, who have their own embarrassing robot stories. And Greg Milner, author of Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds. The problem with GPS isn’t the machines, guys. It’s you.

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