Fragments
Thoughts as they occur to me.
The sounds when you turn the steering wheel and force it out of
driver+ is mellow and soothing. The wheel turns smoothly when moving
to the center of the road giving the bicyclists more space, there's no
fighting with it. Nothing flashes red.
The Telsa both tries and actually accomplishes a whole lot more. It's
always watching and always guiding. Are the alerts actually useful?
Somewhere in Tesla HQ the feeling seems to be that human drivers need
to be saved from themselves.
The data seems to support that, but it's not nearly as much fun.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there
is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The
devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early
share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are
wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious
things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which
it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston
or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing
important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man
who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but
when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his
hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and
not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and
bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the
first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American
ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After
all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the
most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come
round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever
carried a peck of corn to mill.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
