Why We Drive

Matthew Crawford (2020).?Why we drive: Toward a philosophy of the open road.?William Morrow.

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2?the heightened feeling of exposure one has on a dirt bike recalls one to a basic truth: we are fragile, embodied beings

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2?Serendipity … is a secular way of speaking of grace … walking is an act of faith

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3?experiences of serendipity and faith feel a bit scarce in contemporary culture

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5?Driverless cars are one instance of a wider shift in our relationship to the physical world, in which the demands of competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience … Human beings are terrible drivers … We are so distracted behind the wheel … highway deaths overall rose at their fastest rate in fifty years from 2013 to 2015, despite a proliferation of new safety features … Arguably, the first and fatal development was that cars became boring to drive, starting in the 1990s …

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????The smartphone arrived in 2007 … became the basis of a new business model … harvesting and selling our attention

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7?driving is a rich and varied practice … The boosters of driverless cars are unimpressed with pleasure as an ideal and suspicious of individual judgment

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10?an apparatus of techno-capitalism devoted to our comfort and convenience, and to keeping us entertained

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12?ultimate childhood conveyance, a bicycle

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12?Nietzsche … joy is the feeling of one’s powers increasing

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12?self-locomotion … is tied to the development of our higher capacities

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13?Self-mobility appears to be deeply implicated in the development of “episodic memory”

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14?our mobility as self-directed, embodied beings is fundamental to our nature as it has evolved over millions of years, and to the distinctly human experience of identity

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14?Sport is a realm of play, free of all utility … motor sports can serve as a tonic for the creeping enervation that comes with peace and prosperity

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14?“Every man dies.?Not every man lives.”

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15?there is a certain tonic effect in being scared shitless and trusting in your skills to see you through

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15?“To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension – these are the essence of the play spirit,”?Johan Huizinga

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16?Technical forums … cultivate a deep cognitive ownership over one’s car that stands in stark contrast to the passivity and dependence of consumer culture

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18-19?It is small lapses of anticipation that cause most traffic jams, not crashes

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20?We feel free to yell curses to others while driving that we never would on a sidewalk

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22?Driving is a way of interacting with others while having shared, concrete interests at stake

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23?The most dangerous and obstructive drivers are those who are inflamed with a sense of justice

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?????By way of contrast, consider the social grace of pulling over on a twisty road for someone to pass

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24?Lane splitting by motorcycles – called “filtering” in the UK – makes road use more efficient for everybody.?It is an accepted norm all over the world; as far as I know the United States is the only nation where it is illegal.?Except in California

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31?Jane Jacobs … “Utopian minders of other people’s leisure.”

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32?a people worthy of democracy must be made up of individuals capable of governing their own behavior in the first place, and have therefore earned their fellow citizens’ trust

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34?democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence

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35?In her 1961 masterwork The Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs noted that “everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.” … But … “we blame automobiles for too much.”

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39?our overdependence on cars was engineered by the state, energized by the same faith in central planning and sincere (if shortsighted) devotion to public felicity that has always been the pride of progressive governance

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40?Has anyone bothered to ask why the world’s largest advertising firm – for that is what Google is – is making a massive investment in automobiles??By colonizing your commute … your attention are now available to be auctioned off to the highest bidder

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41?commute driving is perhaps the only real Sabbath left to us

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41?we may experience our car as a humanizing space, a space of shelter, despite the many frustrations of driving

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42?(27%) say they went driving “just for the fun of it” in the past week …

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????Men and women are about equally likely to have done some driving just for the fun of it

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42?It has become clear that the effort to develop driverless cars is not a response to consumer demand, but a top-down project that has to be sold to the public

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42?the push for driverless cars has turned out to be ill timed, as it happens to coincide with a slow-motion collapse of the public’s trust in Big Tech to serve as steward of our interests, and shepherd of the Future

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43?there has been no talk of treating as a public utility the infrastructure that will make driverless cars possible, nor of making their programming available for inspection

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44?The only way Uber and its competitors can make each trip so convenient for its passengers is to flood the streets with empty cars

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45?Narrative construction is perhaps Uber’s greatest competitive strength

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64?[Kelly] Lambert … “effort-driven rewards.” … “movement – and especially hand movements that lead to desired outcomes – plays a key role in both preventing the onset and building resilience against depression and other emotional disorders …”?Anything that lets us see a clear connection between effort and consequence – and that helps us feel in control of a challenging situation – is a kind of mental vitamin that helps build resilience and provides a buffer against depression.”

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65?Flourishing – that of rats and humans alike – seems to require an environment with “open problem spaces” that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development

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65?all rats die.?Not every rat lives

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68?Without progress, we would be denied the pleasures of nostalgia!?Put the other way around, “retro” is a sensibility that has obvious appeal as a shelter from the relentless onslaught of the new

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76?Nancy Fraser … “progressive neoliberalism,” that pairing of progressive ideas with some of the more predatory forms of capitalism, in which the former element serves as the public relations wing for the latter

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78?the number of miles driven per year in the U.S. nearly doubled between 1970 and 1990, despite the fact that the population had increased only 20 percent

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89?Crashes are simply less common, on a per-mile basis, on freeways … and newer cars crash at a lower rate than older cars … [Timothy B.] Lee … reports that “as far as we know, Tesla hasn’t provided recent crash data to independent experts who might be able to control for these kinds of factors to evaluate Autopilot’s safety in a rigorous way.”

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94?humans are horrible at estimating risk

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94-95?a more enclosing crash structure reduces one’s peripheral awareness of nearby vehicles … If you have not driven a car from, say, the 1980s or earlier recently, you might be shocked at how much visibility we have given up, and with it, a corresponding situational awareness

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95?Bigger, heavier vehicles really are safer in a collision.?For the occupants

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95?Edward Luttwak derives a maximum affordable car price (about a third of one year’s income)

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96?The near doubling of the average cost of a new car between 1977 and 2016 (adjusted for inflation)

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96?there is an argument from economic justice – as opposed to libertarian zealotry – for challenging the regime of infinite safety

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97?Seat belts … [Sam] Peltzman … make us drive less carefully

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97?ABS and stability control have made significant, net positive contributions to safety

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97?Automated lane keeping and automated braking are quite different on this score.?They intervene more promiscuously and relieve the driver of the need to pay attention

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98?National Highway Traffic Safety Administration … five levels of progressively less human involvement in the tasks of driving, from Level 0 (a completely user-operated car) to Level 4, in which there is no human involvement whatever

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98?Don Norman … wonderful book … The Design of Everyday Things

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98?The transition to driverless cars will be difficult

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99?the problem of brittleness, in which “blunders [are] made easy.”

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100?Casner et al. write that “navigation systems are an excellent example of technology introduced to automate a task for which people already seemed reasonably competent … “

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101?it takes them longer to respond to sudden events.?This is a bigger problem in a car than in an airplane … This is called the problem of “rapid onboarding.”

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102?Casner et al. … Automation functions sometimes quietly turn themselves off for no apparent reason

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103?In The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr writes, “We all know about the ill effects of information overload.?It turns out that information underload can be equally debilitating.”

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104?when the driver (or pilot) is understimulated during routine operation, he is more likely to panic when overstimulated

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104?human intelligence and machine intelligence have a hard time sharing control

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108?Ralph Nader … the Corvair “unsafe at any speed.” … “fun at every speed.”

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109?It’s nice to be white!

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111?“cognitive extension.”

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111 A real “driver’s car” is one that accomplishes a similar disappearing act, becoming a transparent two-way conduit of information and intention

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113?driving a light, primitive sports car is so exhilarating

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114?In the affluent West, many of our energies of innovation seem to be channeled into creating experiences for the consumer that make him feel good without making demands on him

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115?The pleasure of driving is the pleasure of doing something; of being actively and skillfully engaged with a reality that pushes back against us

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117?“analytical moral philosophy.”

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121-122?Aristotelian perspective as elaborated by William Hasselberger … Virtue is more like a skill, acquired through long practice in the art of living … There is no set of rules that could guide one adequately … the virtues have to be exercised or they atrophy

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122?By intelligence I mean bodily skills, cognitive skills, and ethical skills, for they are bound up together

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123?sometimes, spiritedness is the very quality you want in an emergency; a readiness to take charge

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123?it takes a certain amount of assertiveness to override automated systems

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123-124?confidence and assertiveness are desirable only if the pilot (or driver) really does have an adequate grasp of the situation – a better grasp than the automation does

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125?Systems designed to minimize the role of human intelligence tend to be brittle, as they are not able to anticipate every contingency

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131?In Greek, “truth” is aletheia, that which is uncovered

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153?Measure everything, trust nobody, and make it from scratch if need be

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153?To go deep into any technical field is to make progress in independence of mind, and feel a freedom to maneuver that grows in proportion with one’s powers

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168?In Homo Ludens … John Huizinga wrote that play is marked by “a spirit of hostility and friendship combined.”

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169?Huizinga writes that “the human need to fight” is intimately connected to “the imperishable need of man to live in beauty.?There is no satisfying this need save in play.”

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????Play is common to all the higher animals … play answers to a very basic need.?It may be the most serious thing we do

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170?it is the aspect of contest, the thirst for distinction, that Huizinga identifies as the crucial, civilizing element of play

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171?This distinction between wanting to excel others and wanting to dominate others gets elided in egalitarian culture

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171?The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes … democracy requires equal esteem, not merely equal rights or equal opportunity

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171?contests and games require rules

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175?Manfred von Richthofen … the Red Baron

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176?Manfred von Richthofen finally met his match in Canadian Royal Air Force pilot Arthur Roy Brown

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177?Play is inherently exclusive

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179?Consider the rise of the bicycle moralists

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185?the human need to fight

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186-187?A lot of people talk about “senseless violence” like it’s a bad thing.?But to real connoisseurs, senseless violence is the best kind

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193?If you are alert to it, you may be struck by a certain unforced ease of gender relations among elements of our society that do things like ride dirt bikes

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194?What makes for strong women?

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196?Patricia Sexton … 1969 … both the men and the women in upper-class society adopt more feminine norms, compared to the working class … working-class women prefer their men to be manly, and in that respect may be said to accept males norms as valid, even crucial … working class “patriarchy” can look an awful lot like matriarchy

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197?As Rousseau said, if you want men to be virtuous, teach women what virtue is … Men will make themselves into whatever women prefer … What makes women strong … simply by “doing stuff, without focusing on the fact that you are a woman doing it.” … men and women are not so different

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197-198?The most impressive and successful women, like their male counterparts … just do what they do, and find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of their craft

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220?Chicago … experts found, the unnecessary cameras at more than 70 intersections prompted many drivers to slam on the brakes in efforts to avoid an automated ticket, causing a significant increase in injury-related rear-end crashes near cameras throughout the city

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222 Redflex … It has been a consistent pattern that when the cameras go in, amber times are reduced

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223?independent audits that have attempted to sneak weapons onto planes have found that about 90 percent of them go undetected

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227?interpreting quantitative data is a more nuanced undertaking than most of us are prepared to undertake

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229?speeding has a much smaller role than both alcohol and “failure to keep in proper lane or running off the road” as a “relevant factor” in fatal crashes

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242?According to the World Health Organization, in 2016 road fatalities in Italy were 6.3 per 100,000 vehicles, while in the United States they were 14.2 per 100,000 vehicles

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245?Infrastructure predicated on too rigid an ideal of control fails to accommodate the exercise of our human capacities, or to exploit the social efficiencies they offer, leading instead to the atrophy of the human

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246?The human brain and perceptual system evolved to be an exquisitely supple instrument of mutual prediction, and within any given culture local norms develop that further ease the predictive problem faced by individual minds

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246?It is estimated that an autonomous car will need a computer capable of 300 trillion operations per second

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248?Urban driving at its best is an experience of civic friendship, an act of trust and solidarity that makes one proud to belong to the human race

?????Rules become more necessary as trust and solidarity decline in society

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255?There is a social psychology research that finds that Americans are more likely to attribute others’ behavior to characteristics that they carry around with them as permanent features of their makeup, compared to other societies where there is a greater readiness to invoke the transient circumstances at hand to account for people’s behavior

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256?According to an emerging paradigm of cognitive science, the human mind is fundamentally organized as a prediction machine

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259?“Pittsburgh left.”

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260?Germany has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities in the world

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269?London taxi drivers … the most demanding professional test of any kind

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276?a concentration of wealth, a centralization of knowledge, and an atrophy of our native skills to do things for ourselves

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278?the city as an object of rational planning … has more in common with the nonfalsifiable commitments of religious faith

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279?American phenomenon … Jean-Pierre Dupuy … “… rule worshippers,”

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282?Skateboarding easily lends itself to being viewed as contemporary art … as an expression of civic republicanism

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283?Urban skaters are a play community

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283?automation of automobiles … unpublicized costs

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284?Smart cities have been called the next trillion-dollar frontier for big tech

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285-286?Mr. Huh … “… historical awareness and traditional expertise can get in the way of breakthrough ideas.”

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286-287?The Black Box Society: The Hidden Algorithms That Control Money and Information … Frank Pasquale … “platform capitalism,” … designed to serve the interests of whoever owns the algorithm

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288?the originating insight of liberalism: power corrupts

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290?if we regard the smart city as just another scam … the subtle operators of Google represent something more Jesuitical

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292?Eric Schmidt … “… I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions.?They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

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292?The smart city … Unplugging would not be an option

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296?what makes a device “tech” is that it serves as a portal to bureaucracy

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297?Matt Feeney … the more clearly you view the customer experience, the worse the experience is

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299?The automobile is a thing, not a device

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302?Shoshana Zuboff … The Age of Surveillance Capitalism … 2019 … Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material

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303?Zuboff … the goal now is to automate us

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305?“internet-enabled rectal thermometer,” … If you find this intrusive, or extraneous to the purpose for which you bought a thermometer, you may not be ready for an autonomous car

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306?a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner … is busy creating a floor plan of your house, to be sold to the highest bidder … The “internet of things,” … represents “the extension of [data] extraction operations …”

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306-307?“dumb” things will likely become luxury items that you will have to pay a premium for

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307?Zuboff … “surveillance and coercion.”

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307?Google car … the goal is to “intercept people in their daily routines with brand and promotional messages.”

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309?Pokémon Go! … a … proof-of-concept experiment for working out the next stage of surveillance capitalism

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309?MOVING ABOUT FREELY is one of the most basic liberties we have as embodied creatures

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313?To see a problem that needs fixing often stems from a failure to see that a solution has already been achieved – through the skill and intelligence of ordinary people

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313-314?The common good may be understood in this way, as something enacted by particular people who are fully awake

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314?To drive … seems a skill worth preserving