Talking to Robots

When the iPhone is like dial-up on a desktop.

My one-year-old son hears my wife and I talk to a robot every day.

“Alexa, lights on.”
“Alexa, what’s the weather today?”
“Alexa, play Mr. Sun on YouTube.”

Talking to a robot will be normal for him because he’s growing up around it. It’s simple things right now, but his relationship with technology will be different than mine when I was growing up.

In just the last few years, we’ve seen a transfer for platforms between generations. Millennials kept their Facebook accounts but largely settled into Instagram being the preferred social media of choice. Gen Z kept their Instagram accounts but use TikTok and Snapchat far more. The adoption curve has seen Millennials create TikTok accounts pretty quickly and maybe even start posting, but it doesn’t feel natural to us the way Instagram did in 2014 (the good ole days of Instagram).

A transfer between platforms is significant in the short term, but small in the long term. It’s not the same as say, Millennials spending more time on their iPhone than Boomers spend on a desktop computer or Millennials ditching any sort of digital ownership in the form of CDs to renting everything through subscriptions or storing their files in the cloud. These things aren’t just a transfer of platforms, they’re a transfer of entire technologies.

That’s what we’re going to experience again.

I highly doubt my son will ask me for an iPhone. If he does, he won’t want it for long. Phones will feel like dial-up on a desktop by the time he’s driving. He’s not going to be wanting to be on TikTok instead of Instagram. Social media will feel like something those old Gen Zers and his even older Millennial parents do.

The technology will be completely different. We’re talking about how churches can use Instagram and if we should or shouldn’t be on TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg is talking about fitting a computer capable of augmenting reality into 5mm thick glasses. These are not the same.

We’re woefully behind again. While we’ve spent our time debating the merits of social media and how the church should relate to it, the world is moving on.

There are so many things that we need to figure out just in our current day with the technology we have, but we have to do it with all of the coming changes in view. Because my son won’t be asking the questions we’re asking today. He’ll have an entirely new set of questions to wrestle with. And he’ll need parents, and pastors, and teachers, and a host of other people to help him.

Because after all, he grew up talking to robots.