"He fails to notice that "we" is not universal. For high-tech types living in crowded cities, yes, but there are a whole lotta people much less, and even un-, connected to the Web."
I live in Michigan and work in Ann Arbor. The stretch of road I drive on to get to work is poorly designed and clogs up easily, and what alternate routes there are aren't very good and also tend to rapidly clog up if the main route clogs. I started using Google Now for its ability to alert me in advance of traffic jams, and yesterday it did one of those textbook cases where it got me off the highway at precisely the correct exit and back on at precisely the correct exit to avoid the accident-based congestion. Saved me 15-30 minutes easily. It isn't always that textbook, but it often saves me substantial amounts of time.
What was interesting about it, and what prompted me to reply to you, is that there are literally thousands of cars stuck on the highway, and yet, within plus or minus thirty seconds of me, there was a sum total of about three other cars that drove in such a way as to suggest they also had Google talking in their ears. At one point there was five of us appearing to dodge around pretty well, but two of them got back on at an entrance that would be tempting to a human but was still a bad choice (the alternative requires driving through a village for about a mile at 25 mph and two out-of-sync traffic lights, which on this day was still a win over the highway, but usually a bad idea even when the highway is "normally" clogged).
To a first approximation, "everybody" is on Facebook, but beyond that, honestly, the penetration of "wiredness" is much more shallow than those of us here can easily assume.
I live in Michigan and work in Ann Arbor. The stretch of road I drive on to get to work is poorly designed and clogs up easily, and what alternate routes there are aren't very good and also tend to rapidly clog up if the main route clogs. I started using Google Now for its ability to alert me in advance of traffic jams, and yesterday it did one of those textbook cases where it got me off the highway at precisely the correct exit and back on at precisely the correct exit to avoid the accident-based congestion. Saved me 15-30 minutes easily. It isn't always that textbook, but it often saves me substantial amounts of time.
What was interesting about it, and what prompted me to reply to you, is that there are literally thousands of cars stuck on the highway, and yet, within plus or minus thirty seconds of me, there was a sum total of about three other cars that drove in such a way as to suggest they also had Google talking in their ears. At one point there was five of us appearing to dodge around pretty well, but two of them got back on at an entrance that would be tempting to a human but was still a bad choice (the alternative requires driving through a village for about a mile at 25 mph and two out-of-sync traffic lights, which on this day was still a win over the highway, but usually a bad idea even when the highway is "normally" clogged).
To a first approximation, "everybody" is on Facebook, but beyond that, honestly, the penetration of "wiredness" is much more shallow than those of us here can easily assume.