STARING INTO THE ABYSS
The trouble with the aforementioned silly season is that these days it seems to be a more or less permanent fixture. Take the headline of this ‘news’ release (and I use that term advisedly) from Jaguar Land Rover in early September. ‘Hello, my name is Sayer. I am the steering wheel of the future.’ This, too, warranted closer inspection before being consigned to my e-mail trash folder.
Sayer – which is apparently named after Malcolm Sayer, one of Jaguar’s most famous designers between 1951 and 1970, and not the slightly irritating pop singer of the 1970s and 1980s, Leo Sayer – is the ‘steering wheel concept that lives in your home and becomes your trusted companion’. It is the first voiceactivated artificial-intelligence steering wheel that will be able to carry out ‘hundreds’ of tasks. (Hundreds? Really? Such as…?)
‘Imagine a future of autonomous, connected and electric cars where you don’t own a single car, but instead call upon the vehicle of your choice where and when you need it. That’s a future vision Jaguar Land Rover is exploring with Sayer, the connected steering wheel that could be the only part of the car you own.’
And it gets worse. Much worse. ‘Need to be at a meeting two hours away from home by 8am tomorrow? Simply ask Sayer from the comfort of your living room and it will work out when you get up, when a car needs to autonomously arrive at your door and even advise which parts of the journey you might enjoy driving yourself.’ (My italics. But not, please note, my split infinitive.)
Admittedly this is only a ‘concept’, but woolly-minded and frankly daft fantasies like this now have a nasty habit of insidiously permeating the public consciousness, and inexorably becoming a clear and present danger to those of us who retain our mental faculties – and certainly to those whose idea of driving is doing just that. Look at the way we are all rushing headlong into electric traction, for instance, without any genuinely coherent strategy for reliably generating and certainly distributing the necessary power. (Which is why, I believe, hybrids will ultimately take centre stage, and not pure electrics.)
I’m sorry, but if you have to be at an important meeting two hours away at 8am, and can’t work out when to drag your fat, dysfunctional and lazy arse out of bed, then you are really not the sort of person who is going to have an important business meeting two hours away, are you? I know it’s really no laughing matter, but seriously, if this is going to be ‘the future’ then I can’t help thinking that annihilation in a Trump-versusNorth Korea nuclear war would be by some margin the better alternative.