“Let Me Google That For You”

“Is there value in a human memory when a computer can surpass it so effortlessly?” Michael Harris, The End Of Absence.

The first time I used the Internet was around 1993. 

There was a little cafe that had installed three computers with dial-up modems. I signed the waitlist and after an hour, my turn with the machine arrived.

I sat my excited, curious, skinny, sixteen year old butt in front of the monitor and typed in the only thing I could think of: my then favourite band, “Rancid.”

After about forty seconds of loading I landed on a Geocities fan page, complete with spinning anarchy gifs and low res photos. There was a ten second sound clip that took eight minutes to download, which used up my allotted time, and I went home and lay in bed that night dreaming of all the things I could do with this “World Wide Web.” Mostly flirting with girls on AOL chat.

Fast forward to 2016. I’m chatting with my buddy over Facebook on my Macbook while streaming Game of Thrones on my 46” flat screen. I ask him a technical question about WordPress, and after an annoyingly long nineteen seconds, he responds:

“You want me to Google that for you, Tony?”

He then forwards me to a website called “Let me Google that for you.” And all I can think is that in the time it took my jerkface friend to type that address into the url, copy and paste the link into this chat and hit send, he could have answered my question. I can’t mock his sardonic response, because I’d be a hypocrite.

My mother used to ask me all sorts of questions about her Ipad, and one day I said “You can just Google that mom.”

“I don’t want to Google that. I want my son to tell me!”

And it annoyed me then, but I get it. When we search for information we want a straight line to the solution, and from someone we trust. We just don’t trust Google as much as we do our friends and family. Google is not our friend. And besides, we often don’t really want to find an answer—we just want to communicate with someone.

And now, I rarely ask people questions I can’t Google. Asking a question will soon be perceived as intellectual laziness. 

As a society we’re coming to grips with the fact that if we ask someone for directions, they will likely say: “Don’t you have a smart phone? Use maps. Google it.”

We see this ability to access information not as a trip to the source of pure knowledge, but as part of who we are. Yes, like the Borg, we are one with information…one with the cloud.

In “The End of Absence” Michael Harris references a story by the great Roman stoic Seneca, of a wealthy socialite named Calvisius Sabinus, who wishing to impress his peers, instead of memorizing the great poetry and philosophy of his time, purchases slaves and instructs them to memorize it for him.

At his dinner parties, rather than recalling the wisdom from memory, like a Google search his slaves would recite for him. What he valued was not the knowledge itself—but access to the knowledge. Sabinus figured that since he owned his slaves, their knowledge was his.

Owning a frail and sickly body, one of Sabinus’s friends mocked him saying he would make a fine wrestler. “But how can I?” Sabinus replied. “I am scarcely alive now.”

“Don’t say that, I implore you,” replied the friend. “Think how many perfectly healthy slaves you have.”

In the not too distant future, all information will be available at the speed of thought. We will first explore virtual reality, and then with augmented reality, and finally implants that will mesh the virtual and real. There will be no need to ask questions like “How are you?” as emoticons will hover above our heads displaying for all our emotional states. Asking for directions will elicit confusion, as virtual arrows will point the way. Our world will be laid with yellow brick roads.

It will be much faster, and politer, to access data virtually, rather than bother someone with something as silly and lazy as a question.

Perhaps having 24/7 Google support will free our communication from mundane questions like how to fix broken bike chains, or where to find Vegan coffee shops. Maybe it will free our conversations for deeper, more philosophical discussions about our emotions, intuitions, and spirituality.

But we’ll probably be too busy playing video games, absorbing “blink bait” and masturbating in Transhumanist virtual lucidity to notice that the more we connect to the machine world of instant data and remote social connection, the lonelier and dumber we become.

Some of us who embrace our cyborg future will augment not only our access to information, but also deepen our wisdom. But I fear the vast majority will lose a skill and a deep pleasure that people in our time take for granted:

The ability to communicate clearly and masterfully—without the aid of machines.