I remember jumping into one of the early cars with parking assist back in the day. At the time, I had a ’91 Toyota hilux. Quite a contrast.
I turned around to parallel park the rental, and the screen lights up, it starts beeping. There’s some guiding lines on the display, some more lights flashing on the side mirrors, and the wheel starts turning itself.
I must have bumped something. Took me a second to figure out how to turn it off and park the car normally.
Parking assist is pretty old-school now, and self-driving cars are more or less here. But no matter how efficient or convenient things get, we end up with a trade.
As the car parks me in front of the café, rather than me parking the car, sure I could check those emails that surely can’t wait, or even just daydream out the window, but I also lose something in the process…
As we hand over bandwidth and memory to monitors, watches and phones, there’s little incentive to maintain it ourselves.
Our capacity for spatial awareness, movement, coordination, independent thinking, memory and problem solving is cultivated through necessity, not a nice add-on feature that we’re lucky to have.
If you take the necessity away for long enough, you lose the feature.
In some areas, tech is an amazing tool. But always having more bandwidth in your phone or your watch than you do in your brain, may not always be the answer.
