There is a television programme broadcast by the BBC in the UK called QI. The initials in the title stand for Quite Interesting . The premise is that a group of entertainers, usually comedians, have to produce quite interesting facts around a particular topic. It has been running for many years now and the only person who has appeared on every episode is the comedian Alan Davies. He is on the show to be the not-so clever stooge to the ever so clever host. The original and, as is commonly the way with this things, most widely regarded as the best was the very very smart Stephen Fry. There is no denying that Fry is a clever person. He is witty, intelligent and sharp. The perfect host for a show that is intended to celebrate wit, intellect, and speed of thought. Points are awarded for, well being smartarsed really. It obviously helps if you are smart and funny but the former outscores the latter. Alan Davies, whilst no doubt being somewhat clever, is on the show to be not only funny but funny and not so smart. That is his role and one to which he has excelled throughout the tenure of the show. Towards the end of each show there is a section called ‘General Ignorance’. This is a quick-fire series of quirky questions designed to solicit the most obvious (and generally incorrect) answer. I recall on one episode there was a particular question which asked ‘which contains the most caffeine – a cup of tea or a cup of coffee?’. If I am honest I cannot remember which it is because the way the programme works is that, at this stage of the show, if you go for the obvious answer (coffee?) then you are likely to be incorrect because that is ‘what everyone thinks’ because it’s actually tea. Or was it the other way round? It doesn’t really matter, Alan Davies, the everyman always-getting-it-wrong character, will invariably take one for the team and Fry will smile, slightly indulgently, and amaze/annoy us with the right answer. I’d say that is his role but I slightly suspect he might be like that all the time.
No-one likes a smart arse though and I was reminded of this on our recent trip to France in our camper van. We like to listen to music whilst travelling and I have my phone connected to the in-van sound system so that I can access my Spotify library (other streaming services are available). I, like many people, have a number of, what I consider to be, fairly carefully curated playlists of current fave-raves or classic family CDs. It was when listening to the Car CDs playlist, an attempt to reproduce all the compilations I put together for family holidays, that I noticed that Spotify would slip in a track that we hadn’t originally included but which bore some resemblance to the previously (chosen by me) track played. This ‘feature’ I discovered is called Smart Shuffle. According to Spotify, it ‘breathes new life into carefully curated playlists, shuffling tracks and adding new, perfectly tailored suggestions ‘(my italics). The feature can be turned off but not when you are driving at 70 mph on the motorway. So we had to suffer (or invariably skip) these unwanted auditory additions being injected and, frankly, playing merry heck with my memory of whether they had been on the original CDs or not.
The other thing we use my phone for in the van is for navigation. I lean towards Google Maps but both that and Apple Maps tend to behave in the same way. One of the most annoying things we find when we travel to a camp site is that the final 5 or 10 miles we are, invariably, taken down very narrow, often single-track, roads. By this stage of the journey I am usually feeling quite tired and really just want to get to my destination. I am not necessarily concerned as to whether it is the most efficient (as defined by Google Maps) way. On the contrary, I would absolutely prefer the easiest way. Navigating tiny roads with the threat of oncoming traffic forcing me either into a ditch or having to reverse back to a suitable passing place is not the most relaxed way to end a lengthy journey just to save a few minutes or a couple of miles. It feels like the app is trying to show us just how smart it can be by finding the most obscure route available. We could, of course, defy the sat-nav and find a different, more navigable, road but have you tried that? I know this thing is a programmed device but it feels like it has been genuinely affronted by my defiance. There is a moment where it continues to assume you are on the ‘right’ road before it detects your disobedience. The ensuing steadfast refusal to accept that you might actually know best as it works out how you can get back to where you should be is quite thrilling. It feels personal. The culmination of this was whilst we were navigating our way round Paris recently and we came upon a height restriction on one of the tunnels under the Seine. We had no idea of where we were and so we just kept trying other ways in the hope that Google Maps would offer us an alternative but it just kept trying to take us back to a road we couldn’t actually use. It took a good half hour before it gave up and plotted a new route to our destination. This, as you can imagine, was not the most relaxed 30 minutes of our holiday(!).
The best way to counter this, and the method we generally adopt in the UK, would have to been to use a physical map. This allows you to follow the route whilst also actually knowing where you are geographically. In the satnav world you are always at the centre of everything. The road moves relative to your seemingly fixed position in the middle. But that isn’t how the world works, it is you that moves around fixed and, to all intents and purpose, permanent surroundings. You have to work out where you are, indeed you have to know your place.
We use the term ‘navigate your way’ to metaphorically describe many experiences in life. We navigate our way through an interview, we equip people to navigate their way through life. You know the sort of thing. Clearly, in these examples, you are in the midst of the situation you are navigating, you are literally in the centre of the experience, and you must understand the context in which you have been placed. You must know your place. (I have discussed the concept of knowing your place previously, it has become a very strong idea for me.) You would think that in a very literal sense that knowing your place is fundamental to navigation but the algorithms of the modern satnav devices and apps have removed this basic necessity. They have, in effect, gone with the metaphorical concept of navigation rather than the literal one. We need only to know we are somewhere on our way to where we want to go and as long as we get there we can leave the detail to the AI that guides us there. There is an inherent and obvious danger with this ever increasing reliance on technology through which we access information – what happens when that technology is not available to us? To follow through with my analogy, we lose our place. We lose the ability to navigate our way through the roads we travel on and, ultimately, life itself. We are re-placed.
On QI both Alan Davies and Stephen Fry are playing roles. They know their place in the context of the show but either of them could be replaced, indeed Stephen Fry has been by Sandi Toksvig. We are not playing a role and we really do need to make sure that we do know our place in the world, figuratively and literally, or we will be re-placed by something that looks and acts smarter than we do. Don’t be fooled though, it has just learned more stuff than you, bit like Stephen Fry. The thing is though most of the time you don’t need to know it all, you just need to know enough to get by.