A regular theme on Red Planet Dust is about how the increasing capabilities of software are influencing the way we make decisions as persons and as companies. How these capabilities influence what we do and how we do them to an extend that it is starting to change the very nature of our being.

Google Graph has been featured at Red Planet Dust before: contextual awareness will enhance the capabilities of their search efforts. A handsome, very readable, interview with Mr. Google’s Search, Amit Singha about the future of search: Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph | Technology | The Observer.

Even though I was impressed by what mister Singha was explaining about contextual knowledge I was even more impressed, almost scared with the analogy of Google wanting to build the Star Trek computer in an article from Slate: Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before.

While analogies and metaphors are always dangerous to use and often misleading they also can provide more “clue” about what is being said. A Star Track computer is easily imaginable, even by those who are no Trackies (like me).

In an other article The Verge reports on the traffic Grid in Los Angeles, California, USA. LA combats congestion by synchronizing all 4,500 traffic signals

The LA traffic grid makes decisions to have the most optimal traffic flow and is setting the pulse of the traffic. Sounds reasonable for this is to anybody’s benefit, is it not? But it also makes clear that robosourcing does not only involve what we think, how we act but also influence WHEN we do things. Given time we will be driven by a self-drive car which will decide WHERE we are while being in contact with the grid to have a continuous flow without interruptions or accidents.

How important could it be that you are waiting for a red traffic light instead of being given a green light and pass on directly? Well let me put it this way: if anything at all, anything, would have been different before my eldest child was born in the 30+ years leading up to that momentous event in my little life, she and the other children would not have been born. I might have died already, married to somebody different, or having had totally different children, if at all. But the chance of that the one sperm fertilising that one egg becaming my eldest child would have done so again is zero if only one small event (like a traffic light red or green) would have been different.

(Nb this is the same for how I was conceived, and then my parents and their parents etc… quite a humbling idea that the changes that you and exactly you came to life on this world is pretty close to infinitely small. So enjoy your lucky chance!)