SELF-DRIVING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SELF

Anthropomorphizing mobility devices vitiates the self

I recently rode in a new, small Tesla with a friend who was mildly unnerved by the car’s reliability on its own assessment of the road rather than the human who was presumedly driving it.

“I have to watch the screen to know what’s going on,” he said. His wife refuses to drive this car because she’d have to keep an eye on the screen while submitting control to the car’s computer brain for distancing itself from other cars.

I said I agreed with his wife. In fact, since I originally learned to drive on a stick shift, I feel more in control — and safer — on a stick shift than with an automatic, which senses — often crudely like a stuttering heart beat on an uphill climb — when to change gears.

My friend and I are cyclists, and we were going to try out electric bikes at The New Wheel, on Bernal Hill in San Francisco. I was going reluctantly because I prefer light bicycles — my Serotta weighs 17 pounds — but Felix promised a tour of the Pompeii exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum afterwards, and because there are so many parallels between Roman and current American culture, I was enticed to try an electric bike in order to see the ruins of Pompeii afterwards.

I tried two bikes, both Specialized, and each at least twice the weight of my Serotta. They were both incredibly ugly: clunky and blocky; big spread-eagled seats; banal, flat plastic pedals. Steve Jobs would have had a fit.

My Serotta is curvy and sleek, not a wasted millimeter of titanium or carbon fibre. It would be a welcome addition in any museum of modern design. In contrast, the electric Specialized looked as if it had been constructed from an Erector set.

We put on helmets and geared up a steep hill. It was a weird experience since I didn’t need to breathe hard, as I normally do when ascending the Berkeley hills on my Serotta. All I had to do was power up the battery to its top level and then spin my legs with minor effort. Ascending with the e-bike almost felt as if I were descending on my analog bike.

For aesthetic reasons alone, I would never purchase such a machine. As for the physical value of the experience, I’m not sure, since my mind has not yet assessed what my body was doing. Was I assisting the machine or vice versa?

The best part of the Pompeii exhibit were the fossilized foods: dates, shellfish, walnuts, almonds, pomegranate seeds. Also, the wine jugs. These urban denizens as well as their enslaved non-citizens would have enjoyed the same Mediterranean fare at Chez Panisse. Ironically, it was Vesuvius’s previous eruptions that not only enriched the soil for Pompeii’s inhabitants but also swiftly buried them. Nature usually wins and it’s a prescient message for today’s inhabitants of the overheating planet.