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FUTURISM
Selling Our Souls, One App at a Time
The real threat posed by artificial intelligence and augmented reality
After I graduated from college, but before starting law school, I worked for a time as a pizza delivery driver. At the end of the assembly line, near where we boxed up the finished pizzas, was a massive map of our town. I used to study the map when I had a spare moment, or when I was looking over the orders that had just come in. It was an interesting intellectual exercise to figure out the most efficient route for delivering three or four orders in a row before heading back.
I had a good sense of direction in those days. I almost never had to call back to the shop to ask directions, even when it was late at night and I found myself on some gravelly country road with hardly a landmark in sight.
After law school I moved to the East Coast. My new job required me to drive all over eastern Massachusetts, depending on what court I’d been assigned to. So one of my first purchases was a Garmin GPS (the iPhone had just come out a year earlier, but I couldn’t afford it).
And that’s when it began: the utter evaporation of my sense of direction. I simply didn’t need it anymore, now that I had GPS. It was amazing. There was this part of me that had engaged my…
