Google is a Pessimist.

Every morning, a little notification comes up on my phone. It tells me the approximate number of minutes it will take me to get to work via my usual route, and the current level of traffic along the way. The funny thing is that it sometimes includes editorial commentary.

“Time to Work: 23 minutes. This is the fastest route despite moderate traffic that is getting worse.”

Way to be defeatist, Google. Your glass is half empty. And it’s getting emptier.

Now, it used to be that I tuned into the local news radio station to get a traffic report, and I had to tune in at just the right time because they only did it ‘on the eights’. If you missed it, you had to wait eight minutes to get the next one, and by that point, you were sometimes in the thick of a stop-and-go situation you could easily have avoided had you caught the previous traffic report. These days, however, with the advent of all these techno-gizmos we insist we need otherwise we shall surely DIE, I can check the traffic from bed, from the bathroom once I exit the shower, from the kitchen table as I collect my things to take with me for the day, outside after I lock the front door, as soon as I sit down in the car, and on and on and on. There’s really no reason NOT to know how long it’s going to take me to get to work and what to expect along the way.

This is useful. Creepy and Big Brother-y, but useful.

The thing that provides me with endless giggles is the addition of the commentary.

“...despite moderate traffic that is getting worse.”

I’m not sure any of you quite realize what this means.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS TAKING ON A PERSONALITY.

It puts me immediately in mind of Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series by Douglas Adams. For those of you not indoctrinated into the world of the intergalactic nomad, Marvin is a failed prototype robot afflicted with severe depression and boredom due to the fact that he is far superior in intellect to everything and everyone around him, yet they insist that he perform the most mundane tasks imaginable. One of his more famous quotes is,

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet…”

Followed by a dissertation on whatever pedestrian thing he’s been asked to do and why it’s ridiculous for him to be doing it.

I think you see where I’m going, here. Google is turning into Marvin.

Google isn’t just a thing we use to search for cat videos anymore. It is seeping into our lives in so many helpful ways that we’re not really noticing the fact that we basically live in Google World at this point, and it’s getting worse.

Not that I have anything against Google, obviously, I use their platforms and apps and services and whatnot, and I vastly prefer them to the alternatives. HOWEVER, I am becoming increasingly aware of the amount of Google in my life. Targeted ads, predictive searches, the whole schmear. Does it make things easier? Yes. Does it allow me to see and hear and know and discuss and all manner of other things which, ten years ago, would have been far more difficult to acknowledge, understand, debate, and research? Hell yes.

Is it getting a little too 1984? FUCK YES.

Am I going to curtail my activities due to this realization? Yeah, probably not. It’s progress. It’s inescapable these days, unless you move to the middle of the woods, eat squirrels and mushrooms, grow a five-foot beard and start calling yourself Non-Techis the Luddite, Great Prophet of the Technological KABOOM Yet to Come.

And I don’t fancy myself in a beard, to be honest.

In the meantime, I’m having a decent giggle about Google’s transformation into Marvin. Here Google is, brain the size of the entire internet and who knows what else, and it’s been reduced to telling me how long it’s going to take me to get to work in the morning. It could be curing cancer or brokering Mid-East peace treaties or reducing greenhouse gasses, but no, it’s telling me I might want to consider taking the boulevard rather than the freeway today. Pathetic.

Makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe, Google has become sentient enough to be a harbinger of its own demise.

“...it’s getting worse.”

All I know is, if I ever get a traffic report followed by a moan about how the diodes down Google’s left side are killing it and have been for several thousand years, I’m going to seriously reconsider my stance on me in a beard.