The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue

I was thinking yesterday about the anti-war song by The Monkees that is kind of psychedelic and has a chorus that starts with "Why don't you cut your hair?" I was thinking about this quite deeply because I could not for the life of me remember the title, except that it was three words, and had a man's name in it, and wasn't "Sloop John B." And I was thinking about this even more deeply because I was on a bus at the time and not able to get off the bus and look up the information immediately, which frustrated me to no end.

So I thought about how if I had an iPhone, I could just go on Wikipedia and look up the answer in ten seconds, and how iPhones have thus far been kind of a bummer to me because they deprive me of the joy of thinking about things like this.

And then I thought about what life would be like if the iPhone hadn't been invented yet: I knew that I could probably use my cell phone to call Sam's Mom, who would surely know, so I would the answer in less than two minutes.

But what if cell phones hadn't been invented yet? Well, I'd have to wait until I got back to lab, where I could look at the title of the mp3 of the song on my computer. From my current position, stuck on a bus, that would have taken a couple minutes.

But what if there were no mp3's? Well, maybe I could look it up in a search engine. And what if there were no internet? Well, I'd have to go home and look through my Monkees LP's until I found the one that had that song on it, and then I'd have to put it on my record player until I verified that I was right. That would take a few more hours than waiting to get back to work.

And so on and so forth--I continued this strand of logic, going backwards in time until I was a Dutch count in the year 1830 and I had to adjourn to my study to find a reference book in which I could find the name of Beethoven's only opera.

So let's say that this represents the average amount of time for someone of my general social group to look up some arbitrary piece of information (since it's 2010 and I live in the Bay Area, let's say that the average person owns an iPhone). Or let's say that we figured out an average amount of time for the average person in the world to do the same thing given the access of the average world citizen to the internet or cell phones or Monkees LP's or a study to which he or she could adjourn. And let's plot one or both of these values against time.

And, well, I didn't go through and do all this when I got home--that sounds like it would be a master's thesis in sociology or something--but just thinking about it I started to realize how quickly information is being consolidated and how quickly our access to it is increasing. A few years ago Mitra suggested to me a drinking game in which you think of some arbitrary thing and then guess how high the Wikipedia entry for that thing will show up in Google. Then you actually Google that thing and you take one drink for how many search results you missed by. Nowadays there's not really any point to that game. It doesn't matter if you're looking up Mike Oldfield or Piltdown Man; the answer is always one. Everything is on Wikipedia and Google is the fastest way to look it up. This fact is also borne out by the Wikipedia-heavy bibliographies of the design reports that I graded this term.

I'm thinking if you made this graph that I have described you would end up with something along the lines of Kurzweil's generalization of Moore's Law, except with lookup time on the y-axis instead of calculations per second. It would be a semi-log plot because those are the best kinds of plots. And if you followed the line of best fit out to 2020 or something you'd end up with a lookup time on the order of hundredths of a second. I could just touch my fingers to my temple on the bus and say "Monkees song, cut your hair, bleep bleep bloop" and it would be delivered directly to my brain through some sort of bluetooth in my ear or microchip implanted in my skull or some new technology of which I can't even conceive, much like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan couldn't conceive of space communicators smaller than a car phone even though they would become ubiquitous 20 years later.

Then I got very lonely sitting there on the bus when I realized how I'm only 24 and how technology is already passing me by because I don't understand how to use a touch screen or how exactly Twitter is supposed to work, and how by the time I'm 34, I'm not going to remember whether you're supposed to say "bleep bloop" or "bloop bleep" to activate instant Wikipedia lookup from your brain, because one activates Wikipedia and the other activates YouTube so that you can watch the puppy who can't get up on the inside of your contact lenses.

But then I remembered that the title was Randy Scouse Git, and in an epiphany I remembered most of the lyrics too, so I started rocking out to that in my head and it wasn't quite so bad.