Source: Google’s Driverless Car Rear-Ended, Brin Says, Defending Effort – Bloomberg Business
Is this really a good idea? This driverless car idea is an invention looking for a need much like for example, a gas powered toothpick. Self flushing toilets or light switches that turn on and off automatically may have their uses, but have we become so lazy that we need self driving cars? It’s like sex without having to undress and clean up afterwards: is there a market for this?
These kinds of pursuits are contributing to the dweebing of the population; a process that has been on going for most of the last generation. If you think about it, the gradual transition from a society that communicates with others by the richness of language and voice to one in which interaction is mainly done by text is right at the leading edge of this dweebing. Instead of being inclusive, texting actually isolates people from one another. It increasingly dehumanizes the most elementary of human experiences to that of abstract interaction. Nuance and subtlety are eliminated to be replaced by the canned LOL or OMG.
Driverless cars would contribute even more to this sense of isolation. Besides, given the universal experience of software failures, long reboots and arcane glitches with ubiquitous computers, why would anyone place their welfare in the hands of the software geeks that are in charge of driverless cars? You don’t have to be paranoid to imagine that once you cede control of a vehicle to some monitoring facility, you are then at the mercy of whomever is programming that car. Imagine getting into one of these cars; the doors lock and the next thing you know, you’re at your mother in law’s place. There are already numerous options for people who feel that driving is just too much of an inconvenience. They’re called cabs.
link Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash – Bloomberg Business.
I think it’s a fair comment to make that if an economist says it’s a good idea, then the idea must be suspect. There’s the old joke that the reason that there are decimal points is because economists have a sense of humor. As many will know, economists live in the most esoteric of worlds in which arcane models are developed to explain movements in prices and in the supply and demand dynamics of goods and services in an economy. If convincing enough, such models are used to form political policies which greatly affect the lives of citizens. Often, these models are created with the most fundamental error in assumption: namely, that people are rational.
Do they work? One word: Keynes. Another one: Obamacare. So the musings of Citibank’s Mr. Buiter who thinks that the time is nigh to consider abolishing cash is a clarion call to go exactly the opposite way. As many should have realized by now, the pervasive invasion of everyone’s privacy by all manner of intrusions whether mandated by law or volunteered via the seduction of social media has made everyone a drone whose activities can be traced at almost any given time. You don’t need to wear tinfoil hats to be a bit wary of that. Who isn’t a bit creeped out when an ad for electric dog polishers shows up on your favorite website right after you were searching for the prices of them the day before?
If all money is electronically stored and there is no cash, there is a trail of every activity that you engage in. This will make life entirely more cumbersome for the regular people who don’t live in the make believe world of economists. While this can put a crimp into nefarious activities such as drug deals, it will also make it difficult to bribe doormen at bars and restaurants, to say nothing of how to discreetly show appreciation for your favorite exotic dancer.
A world in which cash is eliminated is a world in which we all become just numbers to be picked up as if we were in some futuristic Tom Cruise sci-fi flick. I think we should go the other way. Rather than having our net worth governed by some geek bureaucrat with access to a keyboard, we should go back to paying for things in cash. Judging by what has happened when you allow lawyers to make laws and accountants to oversee taxes, it would be fatal to allow economists to eliminate cash.