A Quarter Mile West of Reality
Adaptability in the face of the unexpected
Our pilot on Delta grabbed the mic at the gate and informed us that the flight was going to be bumpy and he might have the seatbelt sign on for the first half, so now was a good time to use the restroom. He repeated that message as the flight was boarding. There were no bumps. Nada. Smooth as a baby’s bottom from Denver all the way to Seattle. I got the feeling that he had made up his mind about the bumpiness and wouldn’t back down in the face of reality.
I missed the text from Avis and went to the main counter who told me just to go straight downstairs and my name would be on the board. It wasn’t, and the guy at the downstairs desk said to just go straight to my car at K42. There was no signage past K36, but I kept walking until I found it. A RAV4 and all-wheel drive, exactly as I had hoped.
I fumbled around first with the wrong USB cable (didn’t have my glasses on and was trying to plug USB-C into USB-A in a half-hidden plug), then had multiple failures connecting CarPlay until it finally worked. I like having Google Maps to get out of SeaTac and up past Seattle, after which I’m good until make an inevitable wrong turn in White Rock. Maps is always completely lost inside of the rental parking structure, but I’m used to that. It’s a bit indecisive as I exit the lot but eventually finds the way to I5 North.
It’s here where the story takes a turn. Multiple, uncountable turns. I’m almost to Lumen field when it starts magically transporting me on side streets, rerouting constantly. I forge ahead on the highway, chalking it up to the local geography interfering with GPS signals: it’s hard to go wrong by just staying on I5. The problem never goes away. I try it with the iPhone on the dash, and now it’s placing me about a quarter of a mile West of reality. As I reach the Skagit River I watch in horror from I5 as virtual me splashes across the river, feeling like my soul has been temporarily displaced. I finally decide to disable to the audio as the rerouting is a whirling dervish of country roads and U-turns.
I begin to think of how difficult and confusing this would be for someone who thought they could trust the technology. I’m listening to Rich Roll interview Yuval Harari about his new book on Artificial Intelligence - happily, the podcast app doesn’t rely on GPS signals - and the questions are the same. How can we trust it, how can we know what is right and wrong, how does it affect us and society?
As I drive along Marine Drive in White Rock, B.C. the RAV4 dutifully tells me the current speed limit is 30 … miles per hour, having utterly failed to note that it’s actually 30 kilometers per hour.
At my parents’ house my father is raving about the clarity and color of his vision after cataract surgery in one eye, fascinated by how much his brain is already integrating the information from the improved eye over the now cloudier unimproved eye. He presents me with a Scientific American article entitled “What Did Humans Evolve To Eat?” by Kate Wong (it turns out the answer is not “Meat”, it’s “Anything”).
That night a windstorm knocks out power many parts of B.C.’s lower mainland, and the cel phone network is quickly overwhelmed. My parents are a little more adaptable to this, having not been so connected for much of their lives. Still, they aren’t thrilled to live without their family pictures up on the computer, or the live stream of CBC news, or to be able to text my sister. I’m not sure there is still a battery-operated FM radio floating around their house or not.
At this point it strikes me that I’m being battered by examples of our ability as humans to adapt: to choose correctly when presented with different versions of reality, seeing better colors from one eye, to jump between the metric system and freedom units, to subsist on bacon or twinkies, and to discern the real I5 from a glitchy virtual I5. I’ve written before the importance of adapting to change and new technology. This is especially true as we age in a time when new and unexpected virtual analogs are appearing for things we are used to thinking of as concrete.
Our adaptability is built in - heat, cold, visual or audible events that don’t match what we’re experiencing, feast, famine, and so on - but these are mental and physical muscles that need exercise.
What if we:
turned off the heat for a day
navigated across town with a paper map
remembered an important phone number and dialed it manually
paid with cash for a day
fasted from food and phone and TV and internet for a day
hiked in the forest
wrote a page with our non-dominant hand
tried to speak a different language
tried a video game or new technology that we’d never seen before
Nothing ever really stays the same, so our ability to adapt to change is key to both increasing lifespan, and more importantly healthspan.