LOST TESLA
To enter the Harvard Law School Library you walk through a colonnaded facade emblazoned with a phrase in Latin, “Not under man but under God and Law.” It was there that I heard a lawyer present a vision for the future of human transportation in which people will travel across the surface of the earth at seven hundred miles per hour in magnetically levitated pods that glide along low-pressure tubes under the power of electric motors, ricocheting commuters between cities in minutes, bending the laws of nature to the will of man. The lawyer worked for the company Hyperloop One, and the idea had been first described by Elon Musk, founder of the luxury electric car company Tesla, as a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table. Imagine something like the plastic tube used to shoot checks from your car to the bank teller. On the Hyperloop, a trip from Melbourne to Sydney, normally eleven hours of driving in a car, would take fifty-five minutes, and the physical experience of traveling would be of initial thrust followed by zero sense of motion at full speed. The company’s motto is “Be Anywhere, Move Everything, Connect Everyone,” and they already have a test track in Nevada. The United Arab Emirates has a deal with the company to build a train from Dubai to Abu Dhabi that would travel at five hundred miles per hour and carry passengers between the two cities in just twelve minutes. (Virgin has now invested in the company and it became Virgin Hyperloop One.)
Like the invention of the wheel, car, train, and airplane before it, technologies like the Hyperloop and future commercial space ventures will realign whole economies and patterns of movement. They may also realign the human mind, much like the invention of the map, the view from a plane, or a photograph of the earth from space did. However, in an airplane, a train, and even a driverless car, a passenger still has a perspective—a window through which to perceive: Hyperloop promises travel inside a toilet paper roll devoid of any visual reference to one’s surroundings or reminder of our fleshly selves moving through space, time, life. What might we lose when we relinquish any view at all? In his book Skyfaring, the commercial airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker describes the window seat of a plane this way: “Whatever our idea of the sacred, our simplest questions—how the one relates to the many, how time equates to distance, how the present rests on the past as simply as our lights lie on each night’s darkened sphere—are rarely framed as clearly as they are by the oval window of an airplane.” The future might be one in which we have fully turned inward even as we roam vast virtual worlds of our own creation.
Looking back at technological ambition in the twentieth century, so many of them have focused on making the world easier to access, hurling people farther and faster while requiring them to make the least amount of effort possible. Early on, some were concerned about the effect on our souls. When Anne Morrow Lindbergh boarded a commercial flight from America to Europe in 1948, she wrote about the experience for Harper’s Magazine and said that airplane travel produced an illusion of terrible power and freedom in passengers. They could observe the earth beneath them even as they were insulated, detached, “comfortable, well-fed, aloof, and superior.” Airplanes shrank the globe while inflating our sense of scale and power over it. A few years before her, Wendell Willkie wrote that “[t]here are no distant places any longer; the world is small and the world is one.” Around the same time, Henry Luce offered his vision of American globalism, which could be the motto of the modern, entitled, globetrotting class today: we have “the right to go with our ships and our ocean-going airplanes where we wish, when we wish, and as we wish.”
Our love affair with speed is long-standing. The futurist Filippo Marinetti wrote in 1909 that “the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty—the beauty of speed.” One writer in the magazine Aeronautical World breathlessly reported in 1902 that “[a]s the speed of aerial transit may reach several miles a minute man will practically be able to annihilate space and circumnavigate and explore the whole surface of this globe with independence, ease, depth and economy, or travel from pole to pole, or where ever his fancy may dictate, unhampered by restrictions of any kind.” When the Concorde took its first flight in January 1976, it was the apotheosis of human travel, allowing us to move at supersonic speed and sip champagne at the same time. Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow’s husband, died two years before the Concorde flew, but he had already predicted that the perfection of machinery would insulate man from contact with the elements. “The ‘stratosphere’ planes of the future will cross the ocean without any sense of the water below,” he wrote in the foreword to his wife’s book Listen! The Wind. “Only the vibration from the engines will impress the senses of the traveller with his movement through the air. Wind and heat and Moonlight take-offs will be of no concern to the transatlantic passenger.”
Now the days in which flying an airplane meant reckoning with metal, combustion, temperature, horizons, and physics seem as far away as the creak of a horse and cart or the gush of a hand-pumped well. We’re more eager than ever for technologies that offer faster, time-saving, insulating travel, not so much as machines as swaddle blankets protecting us from the wild uncontrollability of the world outside our heads.
Time—saving it, managing it, maximizing it, escaping it, denying it—strikes me as one of the prime concerns and anxieties of modern life, and hence a metric by which we judge the quality of our travel. How fast is it, how easy to distract ourselves from the means and act of it, the burning of fuel, the people and places we fly over? “We’re not selling transportation, we’re selling time,” promises Hyperloop.
Perhaps the World Wide Web already represents that achievement, allowing us to get rid of the need for travel at all. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, predicted that a day would come when we would be able to see the person we were talking to over the phone. Sure enough, we now experience that miraculous instantaneousness via our phones and computers. Beamed over fiber-optic cables and satellite waves, we can contract the entire world. I find it telling, though, that while the web rids us of the need to physically travel from one place to another, we cling to navigation as a metaphor for the act of being online. Confronted with virtual space, we still grasp for the structure of real space, describing the web as a place we locomote through even though it doesn’t exist anywhere. We search for content and go forward and back between sites that we visit. The icon for the web browser Safari is a compass.
Hypermobility has enabled our individual range and consciousness to stretch across the entire surface of the world. Yet our mastery is uncomfortably flimsy. It sputters and dissipates the moment the gas runs out or the battery fades. It seems to me now that our range of motion without the crutches of technology has actually shrunk, and our intimacy with the places we go may have dimmed.
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In places that have long-established traditions of navigation by environmental cues, GPS can represent yet another onslaught against cultural identity. I watched the filmmaker and Hōkūleʻa crew member Nāʻālehu Anthony hold up his smartphone in front of an audience and tell them, “The compass and the sextant and the GPS. This device can co-opt three thousand years of knowledge by pressing a button and looking for the pathway.” When the anthropologist Claudio Aporta began studying Inuit wayfinding in the Canadian Arctic, he wondered whether GPS was just another technology that communities in the Arctic would adapt to and thrive with, like snowmobiles or shotguns, or would it erode something intrinsic and crucial about Inuit culture itself? When he first went to Igloolik in the 1990s, some forty hunters already owned GPS units. The device’s greatest benefits were during walrus hunts: hunters could save fuel returning to shore from their hunting sites by plotting a direct course even when the shore was out of sight. But those who had grown up on the land still didn’t use GPS much, and knowledgeable full-time or part-time hunters merely used it to supplement traditional wayfinding. It was younger hunters who tended to rely the most on GPS as a primary tool. The combination of a lack of wayfinding experience, the speed of snowmobil
es, and the ease of GPS could quickly amplify the dangers of navigating in the Arctic. GPS changed the routes that people take, sometimes away from paths whose safety had been proven over generations; some hunters can tell just from observing tracks in the snow who was using GPS to find their way because they were straight as an arrow—a computer-plotted track. Jason Carpenter, teacher at Nunavut Arctic College, told me that “[i]t’s easy for anybody to jump on a skidoo and get out a hundred miles almost without thinking. So our ability to get ourselves in a bad situation is greater.”
Many of Igloolik’s residents who knew the most about traditional wayfinding were in their seventies or eighties, members of the last generation who had been born on the land; had been schooled in wind direction, snow, sun, stars, tides, currents, and landmarks; and had memorized hundreds of place-names. After GPS arrived, hunters could minimally rely on the environmental cues, and it lightened the cognitive load of memory itself. “The GPS receiver’s answer to a spatial question (e.g., where to go) is provided by a mechanism that is physically detached from it (a network of satellites) and required no involvement of the traveler with the environment,” Aporta and his coauthor, Eric Higgs, wrote in their paper “Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology.” “Although the act of physical travel will always involve some connection with the surroundings, this connection is … shallow.” In Igloolik, Alianakuluk, an elder, told Aporta about a rescue operation in which the searchers wanted to use GPS to follow a course. He knew, however, that it would lead them straight into a dangerous landscape and the floe edge. “I told him that I better lead the way and I will lead with Inuk knowledge, otherwise we would get to the rough pressure-ridges field. So I led after that, using snowbanks created by the prevailing uangnaq wind … as my wayfinders,” said Alianakuluk. “We did reach our predetermined destination using my knowledge as an Inuk. Had we just followed the GPS we would have gone through rugged pressure ridges, then even possibly to the floe edge. This would have caused more problems than help anyone. That I know for a fact.”
We are all neophytes when it comes to GPS, computers, the World Wide Web, and jet travel. These are only barely newer to Western societies than they are to indigenous ones. “GPS is basically having an effect on how we relate to space and geography in general, due to the fact that spatial decisions we used to make on our own are now made with a device,” Aporta explained to me. He cited the work of the philosopher Albert Borgmann, a professor at the University of Montana. Since the 1980s, Borgmann’s work has focused on a theory he calls “the device paradigm” that seeks to explain the ramifications of technology at the personal, social, and political levels of modern existence.
Nearly every aspect of human life, says Borgmann, has been affected by the replacement of things with devices. Craftwork by automation, candles by lighting systems, fire by central heating. Devices can do many things, including releasing us from darkness, cold, and hardship, but they also separate people from the physical environment by subordinating nature. So while devices liberate people from toil, freeing our time and energy, they also separate the means from the end. We are disconnected from the environment and the skills required for daily survival. Consider a thermostat: it allows us to control the temperature of our homes with a finger, yet by using it we are no longer responsible for physically gathering the resources needed to heat our own homes—the thermostat conceals the means of heat. According to Borgmann’s argument, the divorce that devices create cumulatively erodes social and ecological meaning.
GPS is the perfect Borgmannian device. Even though it had not been sold on the mass market yet, the philosopher might have been describing it when he wrote in 1984 that “the machinery makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention, and it is less demanding the less it makes its presence felt.” Of course, navigational devices like maps, compasses, and sextants also fit Borgmann’s device paradigm, because they outsource to some degree the formidable experience, observation, and memory needed to undertake skilled navigation. But even these inventions required a level of environmental awareness and orientation, as well as an understanding of topography or celestial phenomena. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that navigational technology released us from needing to pay any attention at all. “The combination of newer navigational instruments (e.g., radar, automatic beacons, computational support) produces an increase in efficiency and a corresponding loss of skill,” write Aporta and Higgs.
None of us is exempt from the ramifications of the device paradigm. We all seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to step outside the onslaught, to create the distance and perspective between us and our devices that might allow us to question what cultural or cognitive price is being paid in return for convenience.
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The French author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry hated technophobes who attacked machines as the source of mankind’s ills. He thought that machines would become a part of humanity rather than a foe because they would connect us to one another. “Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering picture—in this century as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.” And rather than act as mediating objects that divorced man from nature, machines to Saint-Exupéry were devices that could bring us closer to nature. “It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact,” he wrote in Wind, Sand and Stars. “Contrary to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to metal, and by virtue of it that the pilot rediscovers nature. The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
What, I wondered, would Saint-Exupéry, who died in 1944, make of autonomous vehicles? The race to fill the world’s roads with driverless cars is well underway. Some ten million are predicted to be in use by 2020. Google, Mercedes, BMW, Nissan, and Tesla are just some of the global companies already testing prototypes. These autonomous vehicles are about as different from the steel machines of the early twentieth century flown by Saint-Exupéry as a violin is from an iPod. Equipped with lidar, radar, sonar, infrared, and ultrasound, the cars “sense” the environment around them. Some also merge the data they are collecting with three-dimensional maps of the environment stored on the digital cloud. Because some autonomous cars require these premade three-dimensional maps in order to navigate safely, cartography is poised to undergo yet another revolution. The maps used by driverless cars won’t just represent every yard but every inch of the environment in order to tell the difference between a tree and a child. Yet another effort to map the earth in this level of detail may seem innocuous. We already map galaxies, the brain, the bottom of the ocean, and the surface of Mars. We can already “drive” down a street using Google Street View and access Google Earth to gain an allocentric perspective of the surface of the world. The mapping technology required for driverless cars to work may not appear to present any more radical a leap. But I see potential for a nefarious influence on our lives: the more we rely on driverless cars and their need for three-dimensional maps, the narrower our choices of where we travel and explore could become. As we grow to depend upon, or maybe even just prefer, autonomous vehicles, they will choose the routes we take, and they in turn will choose those routes that are already mapped. Where we go will increasingly be confined by the technology we use.
The benefit of self-driving automobiles is, we are told, that they are more precise, reliable, and therefore safer than human-operated cars. They will allow us to travel at faster speeds, potentially even bumper to bumper, and rid metropolises of pollution-causing traffic and congestion. They will eradicate the need for parking in cities by delivering passengers and returning later to pick them up again, thereby transforming public and private land use. Autonomous vehicles could reduce CO2 emissions if they are used for ride-sharing. But is the future of autonomous vehicles really so utopian? Driverless cars could also end up exacerbating the very problems we already have
with modern transportation systems. People will be willing to commute longer distances, ballooning air pollution and CO2 emissions. Autonomous vehicles might not be used as ride-sharing tools but as mobile spas in which people are pampered as they sit back and let the car do the work of getting them to work and home. “If I can go a hundred miles an hour bumper to bumper, I can live in the Berkshires and be just as late to the office now as when I live eighteen miles outside Boston,” said Joe Coughlin, a transportation expert at MIT. “When we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, we’re talking about how do we want to live together as a society?”
The allure of autonomous vehicles is that so much of our travel along monotonous highways slashed across the landscape, often bordered by sound-insulating walls so as to limit one’s view, already feels like a waste of time. If our brains are on autopilot while driving, responding to GPS-simulated instructions, wouldn’t it be better to spend that time in some other way? Why shouldn’t driving become the next flying, where we sit back and relax as we are taken to our destination? But I see the driverless car as representing yet another severance between our movement through space and time and the pleasure of effort and autonomy. GPS relieves us of the need to form cognitive maps, and driverless cars relieve us of the need to look away from our screens and take note of directly experienced phenomena in the environment. In seeking maximum speed and ultimate efficiency, the autonomous vehicle cocoons us from the physics of movement at high speeds and the burning of fuel. Rather than plunge us into reality, an autonomous vehicle erases it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the autonomous vehicle is the arrival of the perfect machine, what Saint-Exupéry described as the one that “dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.” Maybe it will allow nature to resume its pride of place, more deeply connecting us to our surroundings. But I worry that they will further embed us in our individual diversions. Consider the tragic story of Joshua Brown, the first person to be killed in an autonomous vehicle. Brown, a forty-year-old Tesla enthusiast, was speeding at seventy-four miles an hour down a Florida highway using the car’s autopilot feature when its sensors failed to detect the white broadside of a truck against a bright blue sky. The car smashed into the side of the truck, which sheared off the car’s top and killed Brown. What was he doing at the moment of impact? Watching a Harry Potter movie. We know this because the truck driver could still hear it playing on a portable DVD player after the car sped three hundred more feet and hit a telephone pole so hard it snapped in half.
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