I started reading Graham Greene´s Journey without Maps last night. In it, the author tells of his journey to an unmapped Liberia in 1935, and his encounters with an Africa untouched by development or encroachment by colonialism. Some of these are not terribly nice encounters.
As I read, it occurred to me that we live in an age where almost everything is mapped: our human genome, our streets by Google, our faces by Facebook, our colons by colonoscopies. There are not many places left that remain truly unmapped. The brain, perhaps? And the Balkans (all of it) did fail to appear on my SatNav in a drive I did earlier this year, but I suspect that was technical rather than political or cartographical. But not much else that I can think of has not been put on some chart somewhere.
We have never had as many maps as we do today: career maps, life maps, city maps, maps in magazine articles about hipster craft beer locations in downtown Portland, yoga maps… Or perhaps that´s mats. And yet, with all of these available to us, free, I find fewer of us know where we are going than ever. Perhaps we have too many maps, and the choice of which to use becomes overwhelming and thus we remain as lost as ever we were.
So I am wondering if there´s merit in setting out without a map and I am beginning to think there is. There is something liberating, somehow, in the pursuit of knowledge with no aim but to acquire it. I will set out on a journey to my own Liberia, place of liberation. I will go where the learning leads me, without fear of the ultimate destination. I am choosing to venture forth, like Mr Greene and his cousin, into the jungles. But mine will be of artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, and all their emerging technological friends.
Who knows what will lie ahead?