I Need to Make My Own Decisions, Google

Google is great, but we use it too much.

Sure, it's all well and good to ask Google about the obscure and difficult questions. How do you make an outgoing call on an office intercom system?, I asked it yesterday. Or maybe you want to know something more simple, like, warm vs cold wash for white laundry load. Ask away.

But then you start asking it the questions that, if you're being honest with yourself, you could probably just ask someone you know. I Googled How to load a dishwasher the other day. And sure enough, a WikiHow page came up, telling me exactly what to do. Could I have said, "Hey, Mom, will you show me how you load the dishwasher? I kind of just want to know how much soap to use." It would've taken 3 seconds (as opposed to scrolling through all the annoying WikiHow pictures until I found the only one I needed). Plus, I would've gotten to spend those 3 seconds with my mom, which is a lot more fun than spending 3 minutes staring at a screen, alone.

Even that, though, pales in comparison to what I almost Googled this morning. Working as a temporary stand-in receptionist, I was making some name tags for a client meeting next week. As I typed up each person's title, I deliberated between typing "VP of [etc]" or "Vice President of [etc]". It was easier to type VP, but I couldn't tell if Vice President looked more professional. Suffering a moment of indecisiveness, I naturally pulled up a Google tab. I actually started to type Should I write VP or Vice President on a company meeting name tag when I realized how utterly absurd that would be. "For God's sake, woman," I scolded myself, "You can make your own goddamn decision about a word on a name tag!" I'm certainly intelligent enough to do that. If I really can't choose, I can ask one of the fifty employees here! Maybe I should be asking Google, What is my problem?

I already know, though, what my problem is, and it's a problem that you have too. We want Google to solve everything, because it can. Virtually all the information in the world is at our fingertips--we don't even have to leave our desks! But asking a computer what you should do is not the same as asking it how to do something. It implies that the computer has a sense of reasoning, of morality, of social sensibility--which, clearly, it does not. It's just weird to me. I hope it's not a sign that we'll eventually use robots for every last thing. Who needs a mom when you can get life and romantic advice from a robot?

Hmm...

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