Traffic Jams and Automobiles

Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

“This is why I brought Blueprint along, everybody,” I said. “As you can see, he’s a forward thinker. The writer Frederik Pohl once said, ‘A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.’ The claim that everything in the future will be programmable is an automobile idea. It’s not too hard to see or say

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Imagine that you're passing a lazy afternoon at a sidewalk café on a mild spring day, sipping your drink, chatting with a couple of friends, and watching the cars go by. That's easy. In fact, it's effort-less: the cars just go wherever they go, and you're happily unem-ployed. But now suppose that for some reason you suddenly fall under the delusion

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The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles get around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy- and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we f

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A traffic jam is often the first sign that some strategy is reaching its expiration date. Early on, a successful strategy has few proponents because the strategy isn't successful yet . There are few people on the highway because there is no way to know yet whether that highway is going to get you where you want to go.

But as it becomes more apparent... See more

I avoid traffic jams, because some part of me knows that they will deliver feelings of frustration. It’s really feelings of frustration I want to avoid, but often think that a big expanse of slowly moving cars is itself a terrible thing.

We often assume that the world of today would stun a visitor from fifty years ago. In truth, for every miraculous iPad there are countless partly broken realities: WiFi passwords, connectivity, battery life, privacy and compatibility amongst others. The real skill of creating a compelling and engaging view of the future lies not in designing the gl... See more