An absolutely beautiful new work of writing states much of what I’ve been saying in my presentations since at least 2016: driverless cars are being designed to promote a “hellscape” that nobody should want.

With autonomous vehicles it’s both: It can’t work, but the companies will create problems because they’ll pursue it anyway. If a surgeon does invasive surgery and it doesn’t work, he’s going to do a lot of harm to your body without curing you. The destruction of pre-automobile cities like St. Louis or Cincinnati to create space for cars didn’t mean that car dependency ever met its promises — but it did mean that the belief that it could was profoundly destructive.

Waymo likes to claim that autonomous vehicles are working right now. The reason it works is that there is a hellscape that these things have to go through, called Chandler, Arizona. Density is too low for anything other than driving to work well, every residential street is too wide, the non-residential roads are all multilane arterials with turning lanes, and every destination is surrounded by a vast parking lot. If that’s what you have to create for autonomous vehicles to work, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. It’s not worth it.

It works because there is a hellscape. Couldn’t have said it any better.

In other words, if someone builds technology that can only be successful on the moon, don’t be surprised when they try to trick you into leaving your colorful alive world and going to a gray lifeless surface of the moon… so they can remain profitable regardless of your loss.

Jaywalking is a racist fantasy crime that was fabricated by car companies, for another angle on this same problem.

The new book is called “Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving” and it’s obvious it was written by a historian.

Cigarettes provide a historical lesson. When the Surgeon General’s report came out in 1964, the discussion the tobacco companies wanted to have was, “How do we make cigarettes safe?” That was getting the problem wrong. The real problem was, “How we can free ourselves from cigarettes?” […] It’s freeing ourselves from a world where if you don’t have a car you’re doomed, because you can’t get to work. The accommodation of car dependency is the perpetuation of car dependency.

Boom.

As I’ve been saying through every channel I can, history tells us that driverless cars will kill more people not less. They will cause more fatalities and do far more harms, not less. This is a function of centrally-planned and controlled decisions about human-life that values it less and less (e.g. jaywalking history) while fraudulently claiming to care more than anything before.

And so far my early predictions from five years ago have been sadly accurate.

Where does this go? Driverless will bring a “hellscape” where “…motordom has successfully prevented Americans from [freedom of choice]…”.

Giles Raymond DeMourot reminded me recently of when Robert Biggs (a terminally ill World War II veteran) sent President Eisenhower a letter complaining recent speeches had conveyed a feeling of “hedging and a little uncertainty”.

February 10th, 1959 the U.S. President a letter to Biggs with a very philosophical response:

I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed. Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.

The mental stress and burden which this form of government imposes has been particularly well recognized in a little book about which I have spoken on several occasions. It is “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer; you might find it of interest. In it he points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.

It is difficult indeed to maintain a reasoned and accurately informed understanding of our defense situation on the part of our citizenry when many prominent officials, possessing no standing or expertness except as they themselves claim it, attempt to further their own ideas or interests by resorting to statements more distinguished by stridency than accuracy.

This “breath of life” framing about debate and democracy wasn’t new for Eisenhower.

September 27, 1948 he gave an anti-fascism talk to the Jewish Theological Seminary:

I can see no reason why we ourselves, if we believe – as the dictators would have us – that men are merely animals, should defend equal rights for each other before the law. But we believe that because men have each been born with a soul they have inalienable rights and none can take them away. These rights can never be destroyed. That belief came from the ancient Jewish leaders. They taught and gave their lives in this belief. They taught us that although man is made of the dust of the earth, having had the breath of life breathed into him, he is a living soul. On this belief is based the doctrines that the American Army fought to defend.

The subtext here is that debate is a breath of life insomuch as it’s non-toxic.

Both of Eisenhower’s explanations say he believed there must be ample room for disquiet, while acknowledging he just led armies to destroy threats to peace — a seeming contradiction.

Really he was expressing tolerance with a limit, or a science of extremism, which has some way of indicating when things have gone too far. Eisenhower later evolved his philosophical beliefs along the lines of blocking extremism, expressing a need for measuring respect and trust.

Were his thoughts too late to stop the devolution of the GOP into a party of hate? Eisenhower seemed to be on the right path to protecting Americans against discrimination, albeit slowly and from within circles overtly committed to discrimination. By the time Ronald Reagan was seated as President, intolerance and racism (tyranny encoded as a “shining city”) became front and center to the GOP platform.

Looking back today I suspect Eisenhower probably would admit he should have blocked Nixon being nominated to be his VP candidate (he asked for alternatives but none were given). Waffling along and ignoring such a risk to the GOP and America was a mistake.

Today he might even admit Truman’s scathing warning was right in 1952 when he didn’t mince words about Eisenhower failing to stop the coming dangers to democracy:

The Republican candidate [Eisenhower] for the Presidency cannot escape responsibility for his endorsements. He has had an attack of moral blindness, for today, he is willing to accept the very practices that identified the so-called ‘master-race’ although he took a leading part in liberating Europe from their domination. I do not withdraw a word of that statement. […] …Senator Nixon [candidate for Vice President] and most Republicans, voted to override any veto of the McCarran bill, which is recognized everywhere as discriminatory.

Here’s some final food for thought.

Basically Eisenhower was a big believer in science, even writing letters about a thermometer being essential to grilling a steak.

Yet when it came to ideas for debate he might have lacked the necessary tools (no gauge on extremism when the McCarran bill was vetoed) and thus opened up America to an over-cooked extremist right-wing future.