Tag: Your Views

Tesla Motors, Autopilot Cars, You, Me, and Them

 

For starters, if you want to find out more about Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, head over to the TED Talk for a recent interview. Otherwise, stand back to witness the future unfold before your very eyes.

 

I hear you from all the way over here in my blog cave.  You’re saying, “Hah! Auto-piloted cars will never work.” And that’s what they said about toilet paper, airplanes, cordless phones (not to mention cell phones), and anything else that wasn’t here until it was.

 

The really cool part is that the visionaries that define these types of futures are “scientists” (or at least champions of the scientific method)  and dreamers all rolled into one. The Wright Brothers come to mind. Benjamin Franklin. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. John Lasseter of Pixar.  (Is he a scientist or just a dreamer?)

 

Medical scientists do not radiate the pizazz of an electric car or a cell phone or an airplane, but they are visionaries all the same.  Example: People rarely die of infections any more thanks to Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin back in 1928.  His claim to fame was that he paused to consider a fuzzy Petri dish on a vacation-neglected workbench. Visionary indeed.

 

Thank goodness we still have these folks in our midst. We are lucky to have people that believe they can do what they set out to do, and that they don’t give up.

I like to believe that you and I have the vision to stay out of their way.

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Big Brother Google

The ThinkerDid you catch the allusion to  George Orwell’s 1984? Here we are, almost 30 years later, and the novel’s themes sniff at our heels. Someone or something is controlling what we see and hear.

Does it concern you that what you see and what I see are entirely different? Big Brother Google, in its best intention to send you what it thinks you want to see, limits not only the exact content, but also the slant of that content.  In his 2011 TED talk, Eli Pariser starts the conversation. http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html. But where does this discussion end?

I know it is great for you if your stuff pops up all over the web. Good for you.  But as a society, we may suffer.

Break the mold. Start looking at stuff you don’t care about! Stuff you don’t know about. Different stuff. Otherwise, your head will be stuffed with what someone else thinks you want to see. Maybe you don’t want to see yesterday’s “you” anymore. It’s your responsibility to see a wider view, the today you, and the tomorrow you.

We founded this country on freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Don’t cut off your freedoms to avoid being clobbered by your big brother.

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