The fog hadn’t lifted yet over Sharon Park, the kind of gray that Menlo Park wears many June mornings like it’s embarrassed to admit the sun is up there somewhere, and I was on my usual loop around the pond when I noticed in the distance that the goats were back. And one more thing too. I stopped.
On one side: forty, maybe fifty goats, heads down, working a hillside of dry summer grass like a crew that had done this job a thousand times, because they had. The city brings them in every year around now, before fire season, to eat down the fuel load that nobody wants to mow. White ones, brown ones, a few with horns curling back like something out of a hieroglyph. They don’t look up much. A goat eating is a goat with one job and no curiosity about yours.
On the other side, maybe forty yards past them, through the wire: a Waymo. White, sensor pod spinning slow on the roof like a lighthouse that had wandered inland and gotten confused about its purpose, parked at the curb with nobody in it. Just sitting there. Idling, if a thing with no engine can idle. Waiting on a fare, or waiting on nothing, the way these cars do now, patient in a way that doesn’t read as patience because there’s no face attached to it.
I stood looking for longer than the moment deserved, the way you do when something hands you a thought before you’ve earned it. I remembered I should take a photograph.
Here is what struck me, eventually: both of them were efficient. That’s the word that kept showing up, uninvited. The goats are efficient in the oldest way there is — they convert a problem (too much dry brush, a fire waiting to happen) into a solved problem, using nothing but appetite and stomachs and several thousand years of being bred for exactly this. Nobody programmed a goat. A goat doesn’t have a model. A goat has a memory that goes back to whatever the last hillside tasted like, and an instinct that says eat that one next, and that’s the whole operating system.
The Waymo is efficient in the newest way there is. Lidar instead of appetite. A map instead of memory. It doesn’t get bred for the job, it gets trained for it, mile after simulated mile, until eventually you can park it at a curb in a quiet park and trust it not to do anything stupid. It was, in its way, doing the same thing the goats were doing — converting a hard, slightly dangerous task that used to require a person’s full attention into something that just sort of happens now, off to the side, while everyone gets on with their morning.
I’ve spent a fair amount of my working life around payments systems and fraud models, which is its own quiet machinery — systems built to notice the thing before the thing becomes a problem, the same job the goats were doing on that hillside, eating the grass before it becomes a fire. So maybe that’s why I stood looking longer than I meant to. I recognized the shape of it, even though one side of the fence had hooves and the other side had a sensor array worth more than my first house.
What I didn’t expect was how unbothered each side seemed by the other. The goats did not care that there was an expensive autonomous vehicle parked within sight of their breakfast. The Waymo, for its part, did not care about anything, which I suppose is the whole point of it — it isn’t built to care, only to notice, and the goats had registered exactly zero on whatever sensor suite decides what’s worth noticing. Two systems, separated by maybe forty yards and several thousand years of technological distance, each one going about its business with total indifference to the other’s existence.
I used to think the line between old world and new world would announce itself — some clean morning where you’d wake up and the future would have visibly arrived, banners out, the old thing retired with a gold watch. It doesn’t work that way, it turns out. It works like this: a fence, some goats, a car with nobody driving it, and a guy on his usual walk who happens to notice that both of them are quietly, competently doing a job that fire season requires somebody — or something — to do.
I kept walking. The goats kept eating. The Waymo, as far as I know, was dispatched somewhere, picked up whoever needs a ride, sensor pod turning over the same hill the goats had already half cleared. Two kinds of efficiency, on either side of an electrified wire fence, neither one impressed by the other, both of them right.
I don’t know what to do with that, exactly, except to write it down and remember it. Some mornings my walk gives me exercise. Some mornings it gives me a simple memory I didn’t ask for, standing there looking.