[morrow]

I'm going to do a bad job of explaining what I think the value of this quote is, but here's what I thought upon reading it: He's not asking for the technical difference between consulting a phone and having the phone direct you, but in a deeper sense (I guess maybe of some false depth, according to some), posing the question of where the line is crossed before which computers are simply tools used by humans and beyond which computers/technology in general must be considered a separate entity or life-form of some kind.

I think the "giving directions" example was sort of a poor choice, because people will think "yeah, a GPS 'commands' you, but it isn't actually 'commanding', it's simply information delivered in a command-like format so that you don't have to interact with it while driving". I think this was simply supposed to be an example of a more general philosophical question of at what point do we program-in such layers of thought, abstraction, problem-solving, etc. into technology that the resulting intelligence cannot be considered anything but another form of life (you could argue that as it exists right now, it is a very primitive version of that).

[partition]

Even in the GPS example, it's not a poor choice. What if there are places you decide to visit or not visit, based on the availability of GPS? For example, exploring a new city in your car; if I didn't have my iPhone so I could search interesting locations (where the definition of "interesting" is not up to me) and find directions for them immediately, I probably wouldn't go through the trouble of exploring in a lot of cases. So even with this example, it's already not clear who is "commanding" who.