No steering wheel: the promise for the road ahead

This first paragraph belongs to Maya Angelou, a precious gift from above who graced our personal desks, our bookshelves, our libraries and our classrooms with liberty, courage and sense of purpose. As an activist for the human condition, she was as relentless with her prose and poetry as her audacious fight for a virtuous life until the very end. We are far more creative because of Maya; she was 86.

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

Maya Angelou

Google's new concept car doesn't have a steering wheel. "It"--in the absence of a name--drives people to places safely and securely whilst acting like a silent, professional chauffeur in invisible mode. Through bleeding edge location-aware technologies, motion sensors, and deep analytical thinking, "she"--allow me to designate a gender--makes live, intelligent decisions as the wheels turn. In summary, Google is at the forefront in building the vehicles of the future and no one else is even close.

Google built their own car. Wow.

But this isn't an homage to Google's driverless car project. Rather, this is a reflection of the rich history behind the human transport system and where (and how) we'll traverse towards usual/unusual places moving forward.

We all know that our feet aren't designed for heavy duty road marches. We've known it for so long that we also figured out along the way that creatures on all fours could do a better job. Horses suddenly were more useful than, uh, giraffes. (No, you really can't mount on wolves.) But like all biological legs, they are attached to biological lungs and likewise endure biological wear-and-tear.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This piece is generally attributed to Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. While Henry didn't really invent the automobile (Karl Benz did), he did build something equally important: he made this invention desirable, universally accessible and affordable to the common person. Apart from this feat, Ford helped developed the assembly line that gave birth to modern manufacturing. Henry Ford's company was also the principal adopter of the forty hour work-week, the working time standard that's still practiced by a great majority today. Oh yeah, I'm a huge fan of this guy!

Henry Ford alongside the iconic Ford Model T.

My point with the preceding is that it's not just the inventors and their inventions that's changing the world. That distinction is and should be equally awarded to the enablers of that progress, like Henry Ford was to Karl Benz. The progress that Google brings to the table shall and must be complemented by more open software platforms, by better hard sensors, by bolder regulation, by stronger political will, by bigger leaders. These will make or break Google's attempt and it's important that we understand the significance of these forces.

Anyhow, I think the philosophical objective of cars is to make the world a smaller place. If everything was in reach, we wouldn't need self-driving cars at all. Google's attempt may not be answering that directly, but they're doing so with curious intent, creative persuasion and very alarming will. Imagine a class-action lawsuit if things go wrong on a massive scale. The prospect of this technology failing can cause Google ruin but that's not stopping them on this pursuit.

What's perhaps more important is that this project is a bold step that enables more champions to take their place in making it happen. Not too long, the step that follows is even closer to whatever it is that we really want. And who knows what that is? All I know is that this project screams courage through and through.

Without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Maya Angelou

Newspapers are doomed (but you already know that) and who's really killing them

According to one recent daily chart from Statista, advertising revenue among U.S. newspapers continued its steady decline from last year. This suggests the sad fate of news in print and why less and less people would argue against Vader on the subject of destiny. (Sorry I had to plug Star Wars somewhere. May the 4th be with you transpires in three days!)

This is not at all a shocking development in the industry of news and current affairs. We have known for some time this trend would ensue given the rise of the Internet and its inhabitants (more on this later). And it's not a surprise either that digital advertising in news is stealing, albeit slowly, a bigger slice of the revenue pie. Compared to print, digital ads are still relatively small and it's pretty obvious that news organizations took plenty time in bring their content in digital format. Perhaps some thought this phenomenon would pass and therefore pretended it'll all be over soon. Too late for a great many, as this other chart from Statista suggests.

So who killed--is killing--newspapers?

Back to the so-called 'inhabitants.' In the information age, there are digital natives and there are digital immigrants. Digital natives are people born after the turn of the millenium. Put it another way, they grew up as the Internet grew in size and scale. Digital immigrants, on the hand, are people born before the Internet became mainstream. They also had more fun playing real games outside.

We 'immigrants,' including yours truly, were naturalized as the Internet became a persistent force in daily life. Majority of digital immigrants are members of Generation X, a period after the baby boomers of the last great war; 1960s up until the early 1980's. I'm a proud member of the generation that tinkered around with gargantuan computers, curiously experimented on vast amounts of software, and founded and nurtured the Internet to what it is now. We placed porn on the net, the biggest and best (okay fine, second best) content of our time before social networks took over. So yeah, let's give ourselves Gen Xers a break. These digital natives are living on land we built.

Clap! Clap!

Anyway, there appears to be no particular chart I could find that supports my argument. Point is, the Internet isn't the real killer. And neither are the digital natives of the world. Yes, millenials are happier getting their news fix from online portals. But no, they could not kill what they never enjoyed having from the start. They were born with a better, more efficient alternative to print; basking in a medium someone else built for them.

The builders were my generation, we, whom also founded and nurtured digital news. We did so because our collective curiosity kept leading us to something more than the morning paper landing daily on our doorstep. We proudly built the means to better expose the present, to more freely express opinion and sentiment, and to increase the bandwidth of exchanging live information.

Yes, we created the Internet. And yes, we murdered newspapers. You millenials are only really hammering the nails on the coffin.

No, we did not kill JFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Although I don't know why that's relevant.