San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books: Driverless cars another big data conspiracy?
How long will it take before we’re all riding about in selfdriving cars? Five years? Twentyfive?
If you’re anything like me, you blew straight past the question’s premise to its prospective answers. No “if ” about it, it’s strictly a matter of when autonomous vehicles oust us from the driver’s seat. And not a moment too soon. We’re terrible at driving. So distractible. Let artificial intelligence take the strain. Who could object?
A selfdescribed “philosophermechanic” as it happens. In “Why We Drive,” Matthew B. Crawford skewers the inevitability, and moral unassailability, of this solicitous vision.
Crawford writes ecstatically of driving, evoking the sense of release and agency of flooring it out of the city as “a shady country road reels out ahead in rhythmic curves.” The parlance of automation’s evangelists — “transportation,” connoting pointAtopointB logistics — scarcely captures it. Still, most driving is hardly peak experience. Here, robotic vehicles promise to uncouple us from the yoke of rote drudgery. Spared onerous hours behind the wheel, we’ll put this cognitive surplus to higherorder use.
That’s the sales pitch at least. More likely, Crawford suspects, we’ll wind up as fodder for a Big Tech ploy to ransack our attention to peddle ads and flog widgets against — another captive market for surveillance capitalism. Rather than a lavishly maned aesthete in a Volvo ostentatiously leafing through a chapbook aboard a salononwheels, think the abject human cargo in “WALLE” — vacant and agog.
The journey’s already under way. Cars come steadily more idiotproof. Many safety features save lives; the benefits of others are more ambiguous. One thing’s clear though: The enfeeblement and atrophy of our native driving skills increases as automation assumes more of the functions of a human operator. Many models today fail to meet the threshold of engagement, and completing a pincer movement on a smartphone is the assault on our attention. The same parties who would now sell us driverless cars are implicated in the state of distractedness that begot a need for them in the first place, Crawford writes.
Further sapping our agency are draconian rules of the road — national mythologization aside, U.S. roadways are among the world’s most rulebound (Crawford, a Bay Area native, considers California’s tolerance of motorbike lanesplitting a beacon of enlightened permissiveness) — as well as the flashbulb gotchas meted out for minor infractions in many urban traffic systems, which are seemingly rigged with electronic tripwire.
But “Why We Drive” is about driving like “MobyDick” is about whaling. Its real subject is the creeping culture of “safetyism” and its handmaiden: a cloying progressivism — abetted by tech companies for whom its moral messianism conveniently cloaks venal selfinterest — intent on sanding down life’s hard edges that, for all its professed concern for our welfare, is inimical to much of what we know about human flourishing.
Crawford extols the inspired anarchy of driving in cities like Rome or Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — in their myriad onthefly mutual “affordances,” exemplars of human ingenuity and organic social organization. Meantime, the gearhead scenes he encounters represent miniEnlightenment projects: democratizing knowledge and keeping human agency alive.
The observant will have twigged that there’s a political edge to all this, and a conservative cast at that. Crawford’s prior work marked him out as a literary centaur: Mike Rowe of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” with the cosmic emanations of writer Robert M. Pirsig. His 2009 debut “Shop Class as Soulcraft” was a brilliant disquisition on the spiritual nourishment, characterbuilding and cognitive rigor to be found in skilled manual work. Here, there’s a touch of the late cultural critic Christopher Lasch.
Besides fixing motorcycles, Crawford holds a doctorate from the University of Chicago and is a University of Virginiaaffiliated scholar. Some philosophermechanic. Yet there’s an ornery, autodidactic streak to “Why We Drive”; the sense of an omnivorous editorializing mind for whom everything is grist for a think piece. His analysis seems at times as “overdetermined” as the vehicular future he fears.
A sojourn in Portland furnishes a targetrich environment, but there’s a canned feel to Crawford’s clicheslinging account: stilted vignettes of runins with wokescolds and luridhaired poseurs. And the event he’s ostensibly there to cover — hipster mummers careening around a manicured city park in art cars — isn’t remotely analogous to the event he juxtaposes it with: a motorbike “scramble” in the Virginia countryside that’s essentially a gathering of expert practitioners from a skilled subculture. It’s purely a butt, to throw the rugged integrity of the latter into sharp relief.
But it would be a shame if these excesses put readers off. Crawford has something important to say.
“Safety is obviously very important,” he writes. “But it is also a principle that, absent countervailing considerations, admits no limit to its expanding dominion. It tends to swallow everything before it. Once you indulge the vitalist perspective with some sympathy, your gaze is shifted and it becomes easier to see the ideological work that ‘safety’ does in our society.”
Stephen Phillips’ writing has appeared in the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Los Angeles Times and Financial Times. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com