MarcoPolo – Partially Functional - Books

A review of _No One At The Wheel_ by Samuel Schwartz

2019-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

No One At The Wheel: Driverless Cars and the road of the Future</h1>
I picked this book up after listening to Schwartz talk on Fresh Air. Schwartz is a traffic engineer, who worked at the chief traffic engineer for NYC. I was interested in this book because it adds a healthy dose of skepticism to all the hype I've heard about self-driving cars. I expected him to say "The future will be perfect, self driving cars will solve all our problems" or "The future is terrible, self driving cars will run over all the babies". Instead, he was in an informed center. He acknowledges a lot of benefits AVs (autonomous vehicles) can bring, refutes some hollow claims from advocates, and points out several pitfalls to avoid.
The book is an easy read and goes by quickly. I mostly listened to it, amusingly enough, from a drive from Montana to California (where I wished I had a self driving car to make the drive easier).
Schwartz refutes some ideas about AVs that I thought were a given. First is that AVs, and AVs alone, will reduce traffic fatalities to nil. It's true that AVs can introduce technology that will reduce traffic fatalities, but it is also true that right now we have that technology that we can incorporate in non self driving vehicles. Technologies like front collision warning (reduces accidents by 7%), automatic front collision braking (reduces accidents by 15%), and lane detection are available today. These technologies are shown to make driving safer, but they are only available on high end luxury vehicles. We have the power today to make the roads vastly safer overnight by passing legislation to make these safety features standard.
The book warns of a dystopia future where everyone ones their own AV. In this world traffic is continually clogged and up to half of the cars in traffic are empty. People drive much more because it is that much easier. They sacrifice the exercise they would have gained in biking or walking by choosing the easier option of watching a movie while waiting in deadlock traffic. In this future, AVs are more like phones. A new model coming out every year or so, and people upgrading just as often. All the new production would have an obvious adverse effect on climate. Likewise the increase in traffic would be terrible for the environment.
The happy future Schwartz talks about is a future where AVs work with traffic engineers to complement existing transit infrastructure. There could be AV buses that could run much more frequently on more routes 24/7 that would extend existing public transit routes. Autonomous mini buses can be used to create a route on demand for the rush hour commuters to bring them to a bigger transit hub (e.g. a subway). Smaller AVs can then be used in the off hours to get people to their nearest transit hub, thus solving the last mile problem.
Schwartz sprinkles his book with parallels from the time cars where first introduced. Roads where first made for cyclist. Cyclist were lobbying for more roads around the time cars were being introduced. As cars became more ubiquitous and faster, bicyclist and pedestrians were kicked off the roads and criminalized. Roads took over and changed our cities into desolate avenues with drivers careening through city centers at 40mph. Schwartz argues, and I'm inclined to agree, we cannot let AVs push everyone else as second class citizens. We are at an inflection point where we can define legislation to prioritize pedestrians and city life.
I would recommend this book</a>.

Thoughts on _The Craftsman_ by Richard Sennet

2019-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

I've finished my second read through of The Craftsman. It's an argument that craftsman are more capable than society gives than credit for. The notion of animal laborens, that man is simply a thoughtless animal, is wrong in Sennet's view. He argues that we think deeply when we work with our hands. The woodworker isn't just idly planing away at the wood she's working on. She looks at the grain, analyzes the constraints of the material, and is constantly problem solving and problem finding. The same applies to programmers. Fixing bugs is never a simple tasks. Often it challenges both our problem solving and problem finding abilities.
Sennet decorates his book with interesting case studies. The skill involved in using a Chinese cleaver or the expressive metaphorical recipe of how to cook a specific chicken dish are a couple of memorable examples. Sennet analyzes the history of the craftsman from ancient times to today, and how the industrial revolution has changed the scene. He asks Voltaire, with his encyclopedia, for his thoughts to accompany his own. Voltaire understood the superiority of machines in certain craft tasks, but felt it wasn't fair to the craftsman to focus only on that superiority. The craftsman has the ability through problem solving and problem finding to use these new machines as tools.
I found the story of "honest" bricks especially interesting. There was a time when the only way to make bricks was the artisanal and very labor intensive way. The bricks in these cases all came out slightly different and imbued with colors that represented the geographic origin and creators. Then came a more industrial form of creating bricks. This process created many bricks at uniform sizes and colors very cheaply. At this point people started to personify the bricks. They called bricks "honest" when they were hand made with blemishes that reflect their creation. No one doubted that the industrial bricks where objectively better, but there was still a considerable demand for these honest bricks. The industrial process eventually came up with ways to emulate more characteristics of the honest brick, such as modifying the colors of the bricks to mirror those of bricks from smaller towns. Even though this happened several hundred years ago and in another country, I think it's very easy to relate to this story. We are essentially reliving this, but with everything.
The myth of Pandora and Hephaestus are brought again and again throughout the book. The myths highlight the paradox in craft and society. Hephaestus was a skilled craftsman but an ugly person (born with a club foot). Pandora, a beautiful goddess with a box of ugly and evil things. The myths are the original prototype of society's fears and beliefs on crafts. Frankenstein is a more modern version of Pandora's box. Parts of the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is our modern Hymn to Hephaestus.
I think the book is unbelievably fascinating in so many ways. It reminds me of when I heard Marian Hill for the first time. I didn't even realize music could sound that way. I was so happy to have discovered a whole new facet of life that I didn't even know existed. The book is the same way. Every chapter introduces some thought or history that I never knew existed. Each page was like Christmas. A nice gift from Sennet.
I only have a few issues with the book. The biggest one is likely it's weight on the idea that a society of skilled craftsmen could result in a society closer to self governance. An idea close to Jefferson. Perhaps it's because I've been reading Ron Chernow's Hamilton biography, but I'm primed to be suspect of Jefferson's political theories. I'm surprised by Sennet's belief here as he classifies a lot of somewhat surprising things as crafts (parenting, experience, etc.), but doesn't seem to classify governance and politics as a craft.
It's a great book, and I'd recommend it. I was introduced to it from Paul Sellers. Here's an excerpt of his thoughts on it.

I read an article about skilled artisans producing designs and selling their wares to mainstream in a recent weekend issue of the Observer written by Emma Love. In two minutes I thought to myself this surely has to be a joke. ... It was filled with journalistic drivel where she used stock phrases of the day like “Traditional skills”, “Tapping into the wider trend for natural materials,”. What she didn’t see was that most of the goods were highly over priced and none of them used traditional skills anywhere.
I wish that this journalist read a little more. I wish she had read this book beforehand, perhaps she might have at least understood she didn’t understand; that she couldn’t understand. Richard Sennett’s book is a well researched masterpiece, unpretentious in every sphere and should be mandatory reading for any and all craft students and mentored apprentices true to their craft. Sennett carefully crafts his sentences with depth and meaning of an artisan, and whereas I might not agree with every single word, I do see that he worked extremely diligently to open the world Pandora left to get a point of view in place first and then blasted through the myths and mysteries of why we do what we do, why penchants exist as yearnings beyond our understandings and why, when we are young, we should indeed listen to our hearts. </blockquote>
from There's a book you should read</a>