Christmas, Cabooses, Cars—And Change!

Today marks the three week deadline to Christmas, stores have been clamoring about it for weeks, emotional pressure is building up, and once again, I wonder what I can change to make preparations easier. Two years ago, I edited my Christmas card list, last year I halved my gift buying, this year I’m thinking about not sending parcels—sending money instead. Each adjustment comes with its own brand of guilt and regret.

But change is a constant in the lives of humans, and being adaptable is what keeps us going. This week I heard about an event that makes my minor Christmas adjustments pale in comparison—an announcement about a pilot project bringing driverless cars to Ontario, a province in our country. This is a significant event for me, since I’ve only recently become aware of driverless cars.

A few weeks ago, an online report sparked my interest, and before I knew it, I was researching and writing an article on automated cars for this blog. Once written, I posted it, answered the comments, and didn’t give it another thought. But I couldn’t ignore the issue of driverless cars and artificial intelligence. It kept popping up in magazine articles and online newspapers. When a fellow blogger wrote about receiving the first 3D created necklace, I picked up the thread again, mentioning it to my sister on one of our long inter-province telephone calls.

“We have seen so many changes,” she said,”It hardly seems possible that we’ve lived in such primitive times, and are still alive to see such big changes today.”

That set us off talking about some of our early recollections as children growing up on a homestead in Northern Canada.

“Do you remember Dad cranking up the old model A Ford to get it started?” I asked. “And now we are talking about cars that drive themselves!”

“Never mind that,” she answered, “Do you remember the first mobile heaters, hot bricks people used to keep their feet warm in a horse-drawn sleigh?’

Much was done in the interest of being warm in that cold country. We talked about the improbable method of transportation we, as young children, experienced some freezing days on our way to school. It was called a caboose, and consisted of a square box drawn by a team of horses and positioned on runners that could slide over the snow. Most notable was the little wood-burning stove in a corner—it kept us cozy and warm, but in retrospect must have been extremely dangerous.

My sisters and I grew up without telephones and television, yet it occurred to me that we, like many people we know, are now well versed in the ways of Skype, and the use of Instagram. We use Facebook daily, and some of us, me included, have opened a Twitter account.

But the buzz about driverless cars and artificial intelligence has given me the jitters. It’s scary to realize that enormous changes that will shake our society to its roots are being developed in tech labs all over the world, and are within a few years of being introduced for general use. Yet at the same time I am fascinated, and have roamed the web in search of more information about this. I am particularly interested in the thinking of Jeremy Ritkin, who has written about these changes for years, and has recently published a book,
“The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things”

I keep logging into Amazon with the intention of ordering it, and then I pull back. Do I really want to know that much about it? Or do I prefer to skirt around the rim of it a little longer, waiting until I absolutely need to face it? If so, I’d be like most people, who have heard about automation, but don’t really want to know more.

So it’s a mental tug of war right now. I wonder which side will win? Until then, I’ll continue to plod through my ‘to-do’ list, and prepare for a holiday that is unapologetically traditional, and rooted in the past.