What A World We Live In

The other day I was thunderstruck by a recently-wrought feat of technology. It so happens that it was an application made for the Android OS-based cell phones commonly thought of as Google phones. There are a lot of those applications, and many extend use of a website to the phone where ordinary use of the website exceeds the phone's capacity. Others are modest standalone concepts, or ones that simply don't work. This one is an independent tool so effective and breathtaking that its first successful implementation elicited from me a shocked exclamation of profanity, and each since has led me to burst out in hysterical laughter.

It's a bar code scanner. Lest I look like George H.W. Bush (i.e. out of touch), let it just be said that this ability was previously unknown in telephones, and one would expect that an attempt to make a program for them that does it would end in ignominy. I honestly and truly thought that it would be deeply flawed, working occasionally if at all. What I found was that it works in all cases when it would be reasonable to expect that the product could be located via bar code by anyone. Sometimes it seems to find things in the unreasonable category. Made short work of so far have been products such as off-brand napkins, convenience store hot dog containers and beverages contained in aluminum cans and glass bottles.

A second product of a similar nature that is more impressive if slightly less effective is one designed to identify any book, home video or compact disc by scanning the cover art. I understand roughly how bar codes work, but can only guess at the ability of a program to identify a movie based on the cover art. A person can do it thanks to uniquely human qualities, but if the data contained in a picture of something enables a machine to identify it, we may truly be living at the dawn of Judgement Day. For now, I marvel at the ingenuity of man and the remarkable world we live in.

Even if our doom hasn't just been assured, I envision a future in which I mightily labor to explain to a son or grandson why this was so meaningful and why we were so impressed (It happens often enough now when I try to interest people in relatively obscure chapters of history and the like). I'm certain that he will be bored to tears no matter what, but it's quite likely that he'll have grown up with such an advanced version of the technology that his "So what? Go to bed, old man!" will be all the more emphatic. It will be a sad, tragic fate for someone with such wisdom to offer as I will then have.