Lucky to be Alive

An acquaintance of mine was driving on the freeway. His lady friend sat in the passenger seat. She was doing something with her phone. It wasn't working. He glanced over to see if he could help.

Then he looked back at the road.

To avoid rear-ending the car in front of him, he braked and swerved. His car flipped onto its back. On the freeway.

The car was totaled, but he and his passenger -- lucky as heck, I'm sure you'll agree -- walked away, with only minor bruises.

"It changed the way I drive," he told me. "I will never, ever do that again." Astonishment came over his face. "I only looked away for a split second."

A split second.

He got lucky. But you might not. If you haven't already, please: make up your mind, right now, not to look at a phone while you're driving a car. Not ever.

Not even a little.

Not even once.

It's not worth dying over.

Please.

Seattle Driver Backs up While Texting

Yes, I recently watched a woman do this. Luckily not from behind her car.

Whether you walk, bike, or drive, you are at risk from those who take their attention off the road to see what's on their phone. For what? A cute cat picture? Something to pick up from the store?

Is it worth a life?

As my regular readers know, I have some strong opinions about using a cell phone while driving that go well beyond "don't."

At highway speeds, in the time it takes you to glance away from the road to look at your phone, even just to see who called, you're covering the length of a football field.

How many bodies is that?

Remember when cigarette smokers claimed they weren't hurting anyone but themselves so they should be able to smoke where and when they liked? Smoking laws arose because enough people decided that it simply wasn't true.

When the cellphone-while-driving body-count gets high enough, maybe we'll decide it isn't true that drivers can safely share that much attention with the road.

In the meantime, while the pile of bodies is still not large enough to get our culture's keen attention on the matter, how do we convince people not to text and drive?

One way is to insist that they do. In 2012, a Brussels Driving Centre required teens to text during a driving test. See what happened here. What would it take to include something like this on the practical part of the drivers' test?

Another way is to use the technology itself. It would be relatively easy to write an app that tracks cell phone motion patterns to determine if someone is driving or not, and then whether they are texting or talking, and report that to their auto-insurance company. Or the police. Anyone working on this? Can I help?

And lastly, social condemnation can move mountains. You know that look you give someone when they light up a cigarette near the picnic table at which you and your family are eating? Do that. Scowl. Shake your head. Wag your finger.

Just be careful and stay out of the direct line from their car to your body. Bad judgment while driving is not limited to cell phone use.

These Newfangled Devices

I remember wrist phones. They were all the rage in science fiction a few decades back, like flying cars and moon bases. Coming soon to a world near you.

I'm keen on user experience issues too. While reading Nielsen Norman Group's review of Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch I have to laugh: "Better not stand next to a Gear user if you don't want a punch in the nose."

Meaning that moving the wrist phone to signal you want an app to launch -- otherwise known as "gesture interface" -- is still a touch buggy.

After I finish laughing, I consider. As a science fiction writer, it's my business to predict the future. Where will this lead? "Swipe ambiguity," as it's called, is going to be a problem for a while, but not forever. Designers are going to incorporate increasingly natural (and custom) gestures as inputs to our various new-fangled devices.

You can argue that our bodies are already our essential interface, but fingers on keyboards are pretty far from what might be considered natural input. What might be more innate?

Speech, of course. Voice recognition that works, reliably. Speak your desires and the computer does it.

What else?

How about you wave your right index finger in the air and chant "return the map!" and your navigation system launches? Or you start walking and your ped-metrics tracker starts up? Or you start humming and music plays, or you start dancing and your dance track launches? Right now your phone can't tell that you're dancing, but that day is coming. Body-reading computers are not far away.

But what about your mind?

Let's say you want to read your email. Take a moment and think about how that feels, right before you move your mouse to open your email. That feeling has a subtle but measurable physical component, and while our home computers and cell phones can't yet detect it, that day, too, is coming.

Power's in the wrist

That is, when you only want to read your email, before you've explicitly indicated anything, your computer will know. Maybe even before you do.

Interesting times in our near futures, my friends.  Hang on to your hat.

Which will probably launch the weather app.

While you Were Out

As an early adopter of email (seriously early -- early like "what is email?" early), an avid IMer, and an enthusiastic SMSer, I luxuriate in the certain knowledge that anyone who needs to contact me can do it.  When I walk away from my (primary) computer, my phone provides this certainty, allowing me to leave home without that nagging feeling -- remember those days? -- that someone might call, write or text and I might miss it.

You youngers don't realize what it was like with phones attached to walls. Before answering machines and voice mail when you missed a call it was missed forever.  No caller ID, no call-back, no clue. Tough.

I remember hearing the phone ring through the door, struggling with the key to get the door open, and diving for the damned thing only to have it stop.

"Hello? Hello?"

Then hours of wondering who it might have been. How your life might have been different if only you'd come home a few seconds earlier.

You start calling people. "Hey, did you just call?  No? Oh, okay. Fine. You?"

Along came answering machines. Along came the Internet. Along came cell phones. Now my cell phone *is* the internet. And everything else, too.

I can glance at my phone and know, without question, that no one called, wrote, texted, tweeted, or facebooked me.

Finally, I have certainty. It's like being free, only a lot noisier.

And then I went camping in the Mojave desert. No cell towers. No internet. Completely cut off from email, voice, SMS.

Wow.  Serious wow.

If someone needed me, they would have to wait.  Think about it: if it's not important, it can wait. If it is important, it still has to wait.

For a handful of days I traded that certainty for a smoky, crackling fire, the coyote pack over the rise, nights of relentless cricket serenades, and a sliver of moon in a white river of star-drenched sky.

Something interesting happened: I had silence. Beautiful, exquisite, deep silence. No phone, no voices, no words.  No noise.

I've heard about people choosing to take a night a week internet-free to reconnect to what it is to not be connected. But there is a huge difference between trying to stay away from the net and phones -- the lines of chatter -- and being forced to.

While I was out I also gained a fine appreciation for the luxury of running water. Add to the list: shelter, soap, privacy. We don't need these things, and they are indeed luxuries.

I've been to the desert.  It was, truly, a whole other sort of luxury to be there.

Ah, the quiet. It didn't feel like I was out at all.

The SMS-Driving Test

"When you forbid things, people (especially young people) want to do them even more."

Smart words from Axel Druart, the European Project Director for Responsible Young Drivers. So he arranged a driving class for some young adults in which they were told they had to drive and text simultaneously, to get their licenses.

Here's the video. It's two minutes and fifteen seconds well worth watching. Heck, it's even funny.

"People will die" says one dismayed student.

Exactly.

Pass it on.

Eeek! Where's my phone?

I'm at a dance.  A good friend asks if he can borrow my cell phone.  Usually I hesitate on lending such personal things, because, well, you know -- they're personal. But this is someone I know and trust, so sure, I say, here.

I go back to dancing. Forty minutes later it occurs to me that I haven't seen him in a while.  I look around. No him.

Apparently he's left. With my phone.

With my phone.

I am suddenly struck by how weird it feels to suddenly have my phone, my link with all that I know and depend upon. All my security, my contacts, my information, ripped away from me like an underwater breathing tube.  With me underwater.

I take a few deep breaths, remind myself that it is not, in fact, a panic-worthy situation -- no breathing tube required. I remind myself that I was born into a time when cell phones were still the stuff of science fiction (though we knew they were coming), and tell myself it'll be all right.

And it is all right. I have my darling little device back in my hands in short order.

But I had no idea I was so, well, attached.

Eeek!

My brain. I think I'll keep it.

Sometimes I'm really impressed with my brain. Counter to expectation as the years go by my noggin seems to be performing better and better. All sorts of improvements, like remembering names and doing calculations more effectively. Nothing huge, mind you, but noticeable performance upgrades upstairs.

The other day I'm motorbiking around town and I'm caught in a sudden drenching downpour with ambulances screaming around me. I finally reach my destination, go inside, strip off my dripping protective gear, and sit to make a call. I'm chatting away on my cell to a business acquaintance and as we're talking I'm looking through my bag to make sure I have all my things with me because frankly it's been a little hectic today and a lot wet and I realize with a shock that I don't see my phone anywhere.

So I dig through my bag again, but, no, it's not there.

I'm holding back panic. Where could I have left it? On the phone my acquaintance is still talking but I know she's got to leave so I don't feel bad saying, "listen, I've got to go. I can't find my phone."

"Oh, okay," she says, but she wants to finish up a few things, so she's still talking.

I've reached full panic mode now and so I desperately search my bag one more time.

And then, of course, it hits me.

"Oh," I say. "Phone. In my hand." My brain, I realize, needs a break. "Okay, now I really have to go."

I hang up. The other fellow in the office politely refrains from comment but I see him smile. I'm less than perfectly impressed with my brain at this moment, though it's not like I can just threaten it with replacement if it doesn't shape up. I laugh and take a long, grateful look at my phone.

At least now I know where it is. The phone. My brain? Not so sure.

Funny as in both

I had to tell it aloud to see if it was, and it was. Both.

I get this call on the old area code, which is significant enough to pick up right away.

"Hello?"

A male voice I don't recognize.  "This is Joe."

"Hello," I say.

There's a pause.  "Is this -- " he rattles off my number, minus area code.

"It sure is," I say brightly.

Another pause.

"Ah, well. Misdialed. Sorry."  Click.

It's been like that these days.  Funny strange and funny ha-ha too.  Like this, not quite believable. Too strange to be fiction. This time, though, worth the words.  Even I was amused.