Infantilize Me!

I was driving on Deerfoot, the name of the small freeway in the middle of Calgary named after a competitive distance runner from Siksika.[1] It used to be that driving in rush hour meant “bumper-to-bumper”. That applies no longer. Now I see more of these big gaps between cars, usually cars in the fast lane (that’s the far-left lane if you didn’t know). The gaps between cars were obviously regulated because a car would abruptly speed up or slow down to keep that gap. More like an inhuman bot than a human being.

Why this erratic gap control?

It’s the sensors stupid!

The sensors might be a good idea because they will “save lives”. That is the motivation. So people who are scared of hitting someone in front of them in traffic will have a computer sensor to lock up the brakes in time to prevent them from crashing into that F-150’s trailer hitch.

Trade-offs

But like all technology, there are trade-offs. Every time one of these self-driving sensors decides to shift its gap control, it affects every other car behind them. So when I see the sensor-self-drivers in the fast lane, it is guaranteed that the whole commuting snake will slither slower and slower.

Of course, technology used in one way often fails to account for how real people use things. For example, the sensor-driven car is still occupied by someone who wants to turn their brain off during their mindless commute. They will set the gap to the largest distance, usually the gap employed for high speed, less dense driving. With that big gap the “driver” can almost snooze to work or watch cat videos or escape into their own thoughts and remain oblivious to the high-focus movements all around them.

The irony is that for all the safety benefits of the sensor driven and ultimately self-driving cars, they promote distracted driving. If I see someone relying on their sensors to drive, I know I need to steer clear of them because they are unaware of their surroundings. Nevertheless, they are still in a physics formula, momentum equals mass times velocity. The ‘self-driving’ car will be no different. The bot is not skilled enough to handle black ice, a blown tire, and minimizing casualties when a multi-car pileup develops.

Infantilize Me!

On the one hand there is a lot of benefit to being safe. Nobody likes injury or tragedy. But on the other hand, the motivation to overprotect someone is to treat them like a baby. When an adult is treated like a child that needs to be protected from the world, that adult is infantilized. Safetyism as it has been called, is the philosophy of infantilizing our society. So long as the most cherished value is to protect people and keep them safe, then the infantilization will continue. But this sounds like the joke, “the beatings will continue until morale improves”!

Why would people want to be infantilized? Of course, we all want to be safe from harm. But why would we accept more reductions to our agency and removals of our decision-making? I think it is because we want to be infantilized. It is not just that we all want to be babies. But we are all mentally fatigued by a complex world and we “just want someone else to do it”. Who really wants to give their full attention to driving on their commute? Let someone else drive the car. You’ll think, “Let me crawl into the back in my four-point buckled car seat, sippy-cup so I don’t spill, and mother-bot will get me there.” Infantilize me!

Maturity versus Safety

What is lost in valuing safety over everything else is maturity. Adults are not developing maturity. They are lacking mature capabilities to reason, react, adapt, choose, discern, and endure (see Heb 5:14). Like children, adults give up too quickly when they have hard decisions or changes of plans. Like the toddler throwing a fit, adults are not mature enough to “handle” anything. The self-driving-sensor cars are just one example of the infantilizing project that promises safety but stunts maturity.[2]

I drove around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris this summer. It was psycho. Motorbikes, no lanes, fast, cars five deep, cyclists, pedestrians, all spinning in a thick round-about of gawkers and hawkers. I survived. But one thing is for sure, you develop new capacities very quickly when you are forced to be attentive and navigate through such an aggressively mad traffic circle.

Don’t give up your agency (James 4:15). Don’t give up your volition. You were created in the image of God (Gen 1:27). You are “fearfully and wonderfully made”(Ps 139:14). Don’t allow yourself to live in perpetual adolescence (cf. 1 Cor 16:13). You must try. You must act. It is part of our humanity to exercise dominion over the earth (Gen 1:28).

Start by driving yourself to work.

Don’t let the bot do it.

[1] His given name was Api-kai-ees. “Deerfoot” worked better for marketing purposes.

[2] Cf. Hebrews 6:1, 1 Cor 2:6, Phil 3:13-14.