By Jim Hagarty
2006
A friend of mine was showing me new truck the other day and it’s a dandy. It has heated seats to warm his butt and at night, when a car approaches from behind, the car’s headlights automatically cause the truck’s rear-view mirror to darken down, saving the driver from distracting glare.
There are two drivers for my friend’s vehicle and each has a separate key. When he bleeps his key, the truck’s interior features automatically adjust to his references: Seat goes back, mirrors go into correct position, etc. When his wife uses her key, her settings are immediately set in place.
There is not much new about these things. They’ve been around for years. But they’re impressive nonetheless.
But my friend is most proud of his global positioning system. To demonstrate it, he touched a button labelled “home” on the little machine’s screen and instantly up flashed a map showing every road he should take from the town we were in to the village where he lives. He told me that if he takes a wrong turn, the GPS makes a sound to indicate he is going the wrong way.
Now, as knocked out as I am by all this, I think it’s worth taking a step back and comparing these amazing accomplishments to other times and things in nature.
Example One.
My father used to talk about a farmer he knew who would take his horse and buggy to town on Friday nights, drink too much beer in a local hotel and sleep all the way home. This was possible because the horse knew the way and would deliver him to his front door. When a satellite and a little computer can take you home while you are having a snooze, I promise to build a shrine to it in my home.
Example Two:
Yes, GPS is astonishing in its brilliance. But what about the CHC (the common housecat)? There is no end of stories about the ability of cats to find their way home. I knew a man who lived in the country who had grown weary of his cat. He put it in the car, drove it out to a road 20 miles away and dropped it off. A week later, it showed up back home which was not bad for a cat who had never been off the property, let alone to that spot.
So, the man piled it in the car once more and drove it 20 miles in the other direction. But apparently, it is no harder for a cat to find its way home from that second distant location as it is from the first. Defeated, the man kept the cat till its dying day.
GPS I can understand (a little). Cats I cannot.
My trucking friend then showed me a panel in his vehicle, a GMC truck, for OnStar, a service available to GM vehicle owners only. If you are in a serious accident and your airbag deploys, the people at OnStar, wherever they are located (somebody said they are in California, thousands of miles away from us) know about your situation instantly and begin talking to you on an intercom to see if you’re OK. They will even call the ambulance.
But how about this.
If you have locked your keys in your car, you can call these nice people at OnStar and they will unlock the doors for you remotely, from whatever centre they are located in, wherever that is. Again, through the wonders of technology.
This, I am truly blown away by. Somebody in California, Alaska or New York, perhaps, unlocking my friend’s truck in Ontario, Canada.
But I am left to wonder if other uses could be found for this technology.
Could guns, including pistols, machine guns and rocket launchers, be jammed remotely, let’s say, by the United Nations? Grenades and bombs defused by satellites? Landmines blown up in the same way? Could every weapon produced be outfitted with an indestructible sensor that would make all this possible?
It wouldn’t stop wars since wars will never end. The combatants will kill each other with sticks and stones if they can’t find anything else. But it would take a lot longer to kill a thousand people and knock down their homes with a stick than with a bomb.
It is predicted future armies will use robots as their soldiers. If those robots have half the intelligence of the common cat, the enemy doesn’t stand a chance.
