You’ve been there, I guarantee it. You’ve misplaced your cell phone, and you need to call someone, and you have no freaking idea what anyone’s phone number is. They’re all in your cell phone–and you haven’t even been using that extra brain space for anything useful. (Congratulations, you can recite the entire Macintosh product line by order of introduction. You’re a nerd. No one cares.)
And now, to make things worse, Lexus is introducing a self-parking car. You just pull up ahead of the space, tell the car to park, adjust the arrows on the screen to show it where you actually hope to end up, and ride the brake into the space. It does all the hard work of actually knowing how to parallel park.
In 50 years, when no one knows how to feed themselves, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
(On a related note, has anyone seen Mike Judge’s Idiocracy? Sounds like Fox is doing their best to let it die on the vine. Bummer.)
I hope this piece of “luxury” costs MORE to insure than a vehicle without “auto park.”
Seriously, not having to do their own parallel parking was the biggest concern of the fat and happies that can afford to buy a Lexus in the first place? Those people really need to start spreading out their genetic pool just a little bit farther.
You know what worries ME about auto insurance in the future? Right now there are some insurance companies that will give you a better rate if you install a monitor on your car that lets them know how often you break the speed limit and such things.
On one hand, it makes sense that people who can prove themselves to be statiscally likelier to be a “safe” driver should get cheaper rates (although I see plenty of idiots driving the speed limit, insurance companies are good at nothing if not statistics.)
On the other hand, I (like most people) would view that as an invasion of my privacy. But that’s how invasive technologies enter our lives–not by the government’s insistence, but by free-market “convenience” that quickly acclimates us to the intrusion (if we’re even aware of it). In my hometown, a man was recently convicted of murder, in part because his records turned over by his cell phone provider showed him to be in a different service area than his alibi alleged.
We’d never submit to de jure government monitoring that would allow the government to track us like that, but we fall all over ourselves to sign up for the de facto version that comes with cool ringtones.
That said, the new Treo 700p is pretty freakin’ sweet.
You, sir, are fired up.
I found my way here looking for the source of the quotation, “No one knows how to feed a city.” I was following examples of the incredible bread machine and no one knows how to make a pencil. In a complicated, specialized world, does anyone know how to do anything really involved?
When computers were tiny, people like me wrote every line of code in a process control system (incl what passed for an operating system.) No possiblity to day that anyone even understands what all the processes do.
Regards,
Bill Drissel
Parallel parking is becoming a lost art! My kitchen window looks out onto my street and I can’t tell you how many times I watch someone try to parallel park their little Toyota in a spot big enough for a truck, yet they go back and forth a few times, quickly giving up and driving off – hilarious!
Sometimes I’m tempted to run out and offer to park it for them for $5.
… I won’t say if most are women or men…