Funny
So this article shows up today on Ars Technica, about how great the future’s gonna be when the cars can drive themselves. Matthew Yglesias weighs in to discuss how this will affect transportation and city planning. Ryan Avent riffs on this, speculating about how these self-piloting cars will be a shared-resource, and make suburban density more appealing, and what a great thing they’ll be for urban areas. Then someone disagrees with Ryan’s vision, positing his own wild speculation, which gets a thoughtful reply.
And the whole thing got me thinking about something James Kunstler said, about how most people’s thoughts about the future revolve around what we’re gonna put in our cars after the gasoline’s gone, and what it says about what people think is coming in the future. So I said so in the comments at Matt’s place, and this was one reply:
There was a short mention of how the author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency (as well as several novels) was “not a reasonable analyst about the things he’s analyzing”.
And then everyone went back to speculating, discussing, agreeing with some assertions, contesting others, and generally trying to predict what colors our unitards will come in during the next phase, the Age of Happier Motoring, when the cars will be driving themselves.
The Internet is a funny, funny place.
Tags: Energy, Heh, life after oil, reap the whirlwind
October 15th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Kunstler doesn’t help his own cause when he makes specific predictions. Last year he said something about how the Dow is going to be at 4,000 by the end of the year. When that didn’t happen, he said, in effect, “this just shows how deep the delusions are.” If I was looking to paint Kunstler as “not a reasonable analyst”, it would be easy to find supporting evidence.
Another area where Kunstler falls short is in articulating a timescale for the changes we will face. The “Long Emergency” is indeed long and the changes will be incremental and slow while we’re living through them, but a lot of his detractors seem to delight in pointing out that his predictions don’t come to fruition on a weekly basis.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I hear ya, and I think his attempts at prescience fail as most people’s do. But I think his observations that:
1. the age of easy, cheap petroleum is about done,
2. we’ve built our whole infrastructure (cities, food supply chains, economy, etc) on top of petroleum-centered technologies, and therefore
3. this is gonna hurt, a lot
doesn’t require supernatural abilities. So it’s always funny to me when people accuse him of making errors in his judgments (or, more succinctly, “he’s an idiot”), and then go back to talking about how our flying cars will be fueled by unicorn-poop in the glorious future. I can almost here Donald Fagan singing, “There’ll be spandex jackets, one for everyone.”
Obviously there’s going to be predictions and observations that don’t pan out, I don’t believe “World Made By Hand” is a documentary of the future. But I think when he takes people to task for planning for the future by speculating on what we’re gonna put in our tanks after the gas is gone is dead on.
For my own part, I will also cop to being extremely hostile to the idea of a world filled with self-piloting cars, but I also think the odds of me having to do anything about them in my lifetime is very small, so I’m not worried about it.