“STAN!”
Beep! Screech!
“What?”
“You just blew through a red light.”
“Nah, it was yellow for a split second.”
Hoooooonk!
“You just cut that guy off.”
“He had plenty of room.”
“His middle finger said he didn’t.”
Thuwomp!
“I suppose you didn’t notice the curb?”
Stan turned back to look and for way too long there were no eyes on the road. “Traffic circles,” he said, “are stupid.” The man is utterly contemptuous of all things roundabout.
“Knock it off,” I told him, “you are driving worse than usual.”
“Actually, I am not,” he said, “In fact, I am a model driver.”
“Huh?”
He patted a little black box under the console. One that sported a sticker with bold letters printed in primary colors.
It read GOOGLE.
“It records my every move,” he explained. “I am training their AI system how to drive.”
I had no words – but quickly found them.
“You mean, how not to drive.”
“No, how to drive like a real person.”
He went on to explain.
After Google taught their self-driving cars to avoid running over children and puppies, they input all the rules of the road. Thereafter their cars drove the posted limit, slowed down for school zones and fastidiously complied with every regulation.
It was a disaster.
No one liked it.
So they called Stan.
My buddy is a genius, a machine whisperer of sorts and if anyone could fix anything, it would be Stan.
“At least you could teach it to drive courteously,” I said.
“They tried that. People liked it even less. So I offered to give their customers some options.”
“You mean like being a jerk?”
“Exactly.”
“Aren’t there enough of those in the world. Why add more?”
Stan pondered the question. “Think of it as diversity. It’s what makes life lively.”
Perhaps he was onto something.
Diversity is both pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. Kind of like heaven and hell, which I firmly believe to be the exact same place.
For instance, Stan loves classic rock. For him, it is the very soundtrack of heaven where he hopes to spend his afterlife listening to Steppenwolf. For me, that is the very definition of hell.
It is why I worry about spending eternity anywhere. I can no longer stand so much of what I once loved. What if that applies to heaven?
It is why I am deeply suspicious of anyone who wants to make heaven on earth. On the surface it is a laudable goal, but one does not have to dig too deep to realize that one definition of heaven might conflict with others – and there are way too many people who are willing to haul out the guillotine to impose their vision on you.
Which is why if heaven exists anywhere, be it in this world or the next, it will not be a place of harmony – rather it will be an utter mess, a Babel of languages and a jumble of lifestyles with one and only one overriding rule.
Tolerance.
Heaven is not a place where we are all happy together, it is just a place where we all tolerate each other and try to smooth over the rough edges of our obnoxious behavior.
While I was mulling this over, Stan was droning on and on about something…
“You see,” he said, patting the GOOGLE box. “With this it doesn’t matter how anyone drives because AI will keep us all from bumping into each other.”
It kinda sounded like heaven.
Almost Iowa 