Talking Cars and Helicopters

“Michael, I believe in good and evil, and I must tell you that evil is winning.” - The Knight Industries Two Thousand, affectionately known as K.I.T.T.)

When I was in kindergarten, in the 1980s, there were a couple of television shows about technology that were extremely popular. One of them was on CBS in prime time, and it was called Airwolf.

In a typical episode of Airwolf, one dimensional character actors playing criminals were about to get away with something, usually financial or mercenary in nature, and at the thrilling climax, as the theme song played, Stringfellow Hawke would jump in his badass helicopter and use technology to track down the bad guys and unalive them with a large explosion, enough slow motion sparks to embarrass an angle grinder, and a column of smoke. It was repetitive, but exciting. The first few times, anyway.

There was also another show, on NBC, in which a pre-botox David Hasselhoff would drive around in a talking Pontiac Firebird and use technology to directly and pragmatically help people with their human problems. The shows had some of the same ingredients. The car could transform into an AI turbine powered beast that could go 300mph while carrying on a pleasant conversation in a voice that I realized later sounded suspiciously like Mr. Feeney from Boy Meets World.

In a prototypical episode of Knight Rider, a little girl is waiting for a heart transplant, and the heart is stolen by terrorists. In the nick of time, Michael Knight, aided by the most powerful and best looking computer in the world, recovers the missing heart, and drives 300mph to get it to the medical team, just in time to save the little girl’s life. The episode ends with the little girl, fresh scars on her chest, having a poignant conversation with the automobile. The thesis of the show was that with technology, even “one man can make a difference.” In other words, technology isn’t just a dramatic event where bad things explode for our amusement, but perhaps it’s a process - a tool that amplifies our efforts, a lever and fulcrum, and it can be used for good or evil or preparing your taxes. A recurring theme of the show is the great evil that is possible when technology is in the hands of bad people. To this day, few things make me as angry as a cyberattack on a hospital.

This television show formed the way I think about technology. Technology is a force multiplier, and we have a moral obligation to figure out what it is for, and use it to its potential. As sticky Popsicle juice dribbled down my chin, I would mouth the words “one man can make a difference” as Wilton Knight said them to Michael Knight, until somewhere along the line this idea got burned into my soul. It became important to me to help people use technology to make a difference in the world, just like David Hasselhoff and his talking car.

The symbolism wasn’t lost on me when David Hasselhoff hung from a crane and sang his original song “Looking For Freedom” at the Brandenburg gate as the Berlin wall crumbled around him in 1989. The Germans are perhaps the only people in the world who are more fanatical fans of Knight Rider than I am, because the actor who played Michael Knight was there with them in that moment, rejoicing over them with singing as east and west Germans became one nation again, protesting injustice, struggling for a better tomorrow for their children, tearing down the wall that attempted to separate them. I think Knight Rider is still syndicated in Germany.

My dad had a Pontiac Firebird that looked like that car. I have wonderful memories of riding in the back seat, listening to Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire, and feeling incredibly safe, because it looked like KITT. Fun bit of trivia - the distinctive red “scanner” on the front of the car was Glen Larson’s idea, he was the producer of the show, and it was a callback to a show he produced a few years before called Battlestar Galactica, in which evil robots nearly conquer mankind.

In the 2014 Super Bowl commercial campaign "Empowering Us All," McCann Erickson on behalf of Microsoft establishes the scene with a shot of a boy—a young kid with prosthetic legs—standing on a quiet suburban street. He’s adjusting his prosthetics with a mix of concentration and determination, and there’s something in his stance that tells you he’s already learned to live with more grit than most of us ever will. “They told me I’d never walk,” he says, his voice steady, defiant.

“What is Technology?” a robotic sounding voice asks. A moment later you realize that the narrator is a human with ALS who can’t speak. Technology is among other things, his voice.

As the scene shifts, we meet others: a teacher with cerebral palsy who stands in front of her classroom, using a Microsoft Surface tablet to guide her students through a lesson. The classroom buzzes with energy, and you can see that her passion for teaching is deeply authentic. We’re taken to a rural clinic, where a doctor consults with a specialist thousands of miles away, using Microsoft Skype to bring the kind of expertise that might otherwise be out of reach. A woman turns on her cochlear implant for the first time, laughing and covering her mouth while tears stream down her cheeks.

And mine. Every damn time. Because when I watch that brilliant commercial I am smacked in the face with the importance and gravity of my inescapable purpose. We must use technology to move information to help people. I think about this idea every day. So many technically gifted people seem to get this exactly backwards. Because they watched Airwolf instead of Knight Rider, perhaps.

Technology is not reducible to a series of zeros and ones, sleek devices, talking cars, badass helicopters, blinking lights or SQL queries. It’s something so much more visceral. At its best, when we use it properly, it bridges the chasm between what we hope is possible and what we are really capable of doing.

And there’s that kid again, walking on a balance beam, then running on the track, his prosthetics propelling him forward. He’s not just running; he’s flying. The camera catches him in slow motion as he crosses the finish line, and for a second, everything else fades away and you forget the technology is there. You don’t see the prosthetics anymore; you just see a boy, victorious, relishing in an impossible moment.

Technology isn’t about devices; it’s about what those devices make possible. It gives us hope that maybe, just maybe, the future really is something we can shape, and that the tools to do it are already somehow in our hands. As Knight Rider taught me, technology in the right hands can be a tool to “champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.” So we have to get it into the right hands and out of the wrong ones.

We must use technology to move information to help people. It was never about the computers.