by Justice William W. Bedsworth

Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the lesser-known but quite brilliant Childhood’s End,¹ famously said, “We have reached that point in man’s development where any reasonably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

He said that sixty-three years ago. And while human evolution seems to have stalled at a discouragingly low level, our technology has not slowed down at all.

It’s certainly indistinguishable from magic to me. The world is full of stuff that makes my mind boggle². From fuel injection to microwaves to Bluetooth, my life is shaped by things indistinguishable from magic.

I push buttons on my little two-by-five-inch hand-held and send messages across the country. There are no wires, no bulky handsets plugged into the wall, no birds with messages tied to their legs, no stamps, envelopes, and post office employees, just a pocket-sized, battery-operated device³ that I now carry around with me as routinely and unvaryingly as my spleen.

Any message I care to send “flies through the air with the greatest of ease,” travels 3,000 miles without colliding with any of the trillions of other messages buzzing around in the ether, and not only shows up on a friend’s device, but finds him wherever he is. In seconds!

The same device takes excellent photographs, takes tolerable dictation, and takes up whatever amount of time I want to give myself for frivolous pursuits of information or entertainment. ⁴

That sure beats anything I ever saw done by David Copperfield or The Amazing Kreskin. And it does so, in large measure, by reliance on The Even More Amazing Internet.

The magical, mystical internet. When alien archaeologists start sifting through the remains of our civilization, they’ll have no trouble identifying the internet as the primary engine of our demise, but they may have trouble figuring out how it works.

How the hell does this thing work? How does everything from the collected works of Thucydides to the biography of Galusha Pennypacker⁵ end up in one place? Who put that stuff in there?

Was it the same guy who posted twenty-six cabbage enchilada recipes and the proper dog judging standards for a Bichon Frisé? Did somebody else post candid photos of everything from the Dolomites to Boyz II Men?⁶ Or does this stuff somehow migrate on its own to the great information closet where my phone finds it.

And just where is that closet where the internet resides? A cloud, you say? Is it the same cloud where heaven is? Because there’s a certain god-like omniscience to the internet’s ability to answer any inquiry.⁷

Which I’m told is now going to be augmented now by artificial intelligence.

I don’t know. I don’t have much truck with AI. It’s given me some pretty goofy answers which greatly diminished its credibility with me.

One of the best lawyers I’ve ever known has a vacation home in beautiful Trinidad, California, up in Humboldt County. Ten minutes ago, I asked AI how far it was from Trinidad to the larger town of Arcata. The answer was, “The distance between Arcata and Trinidad, California is 20 miles. The driving distance is slightly shorter, at 15.3 miles.”

Say what? The distance shrinks if you drive it? I wanna buy that car.

Apparently, AI has abandoned the traditional “as the crow flies;” approach and is now measuring distances by how far it is if you’re walking behind your myopic and easily distracted golden retriever.

What’s more, it’s taken to flat-out lying to people. For example, it makes up case citations. Just makes them up.

As near as I can determine, artificial intelligence isn’t a whole lot different from natural stupidity at this stage. I mean, you have to be pretty stupid to lie to a federal judge.

So yes, I am a technopeasant. And proud of it. While others are surfing the internet, I’m a serf, staring up at technology’s castle and wondering what the hell goes on in there.

Because it’s clearly different from what goes on out here in the real world. For one thing, internet medicine is way ahead of real world science.

There was flooding in Oklahoma a few months back. I read on the internet that the death toll was seventeen people. Then my newspaper and the nightly news told me the death toll was fifteen people. Apparently two of them had been miraculously revived.

Now the internet tells me the killer of two politicians in Minnesota and attempted killer of two others has been charged with two counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder. Apparently, the very savvy prosecutor is making sure he’s accounted for the possibility that the internet will yet tell us that the two deceased have come back to life.

I applaud this kind of ingenuity. And I’m positively thrilled that medical science is finding a way to bring people back to life. My medical history is just three pages shorter than Moby Dick. I may soon have need of this technology.

I just hope when that time comes, I’m taken to the hospital in one of those vehicles that can turn a 20-mile drive into a 15.3 mile one. Time may be of the essence.

BEDS NOTES

1. One of my favorite books.
2. “Boggle” is an intransitive verb. Things don’t “boggle the mind,” they cause the mind to boggle. This is the kind of pettifoggery that appeals to old men. I’m probably only weeks away from “You kids get off my lawn!”
3. Whose battery I will never see because it never needs replacement.
4. I no longer have to wrack my brain trying to remember who made a hit out of “When I See You Smile.” I no longer have to call Mike Pear when I can’t find that information in my mental rolodex, I just tap a few buttons, and my phone tells me it was John Waite and offers to play it for me.
   Uncertainty is a thing of the past. We’ve raised at least one generation which has never been uncertain because they’ve always had ready access to fact. That lack of uncertainty has tribalized our politics. Ironically, we’ve reached the point where facts are easily available at the same time we seem to have lost interest in facts and now prefer dogma.
5. Don’t feel bad; I’d never heard of him either until I walked past his statue in Philadelphia last week. But the internet knew who he was. The internet knew his eye color, for crying out loud.
6. Boyz II Men showed up forty years ago. They’ve certainly completed their journey by now. But you can go online and find all the photos you want of them when they were still Boyz. The internet never cleans out its attic.
7. Although I’d like to think most gods would provide fewer incorrect answers than the internet does.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.