My local Peet’s makes mediocre coffee, a far cry from the cup of Joe my top-of-the-line Breville can produce. I could save considerable time and money if I just rolled out of bed and brewed a batch of my preferred coffee blend but every morning I get dressed, get in the car, and make the ten-minute trek to Peet’s. I enjoy the outing.
What Peet’s coffee lacks in taste, the manager Brian and his team more than compensate with an enjoyable in-store experience. I know their names and they know mine and watching them work is fascinating. It’s a busy store and they operate in a tight space, so considerable teamwork is required. A quiet quitter wouldn’t last more than five minutes with this gang.
The other morning, I wondered why seven baristas were working incessantly when there were few customers in the store. I quickly figured it out: Peet’s is doing a record business taking online orders; the baristas view the orders on a computer screen, make the requested drinks, mark them with a person’s name, and place them on a counter by the door. A regular parade of customers walks in, looks for their names on one of the displayed cups, and then promptly exits.
There is no human interaction.
When coffee shops like Starbucks became popular in the early 90s, they were viewed as local town squares, a place where people interacted with other people from their communities. The internet was still in its infancy, so people weren’t focused on their wireless phones and instead noticed each other. Sometimes they would even engage in conversation.
American society has been overtaken by technology nerds like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who are bent on making us social misfits like themselves. Their utopian world includes cars that drive themselves or walking around with goggles and living in the metaverse. Humans are social beings, but technology is fast making us less so.
Although I prefer to interact with cashiers at my local Ralph’s, the store increasingly is making that near impossible because even at peak times often only two cashiers are working. Customers are encouraged to use the self-service kiosks, of which there are many. At my local CVS, even if there isn’t a line there is always someone encouraging me to use the self-service kiosk.
My favorite sushi restaurant, a place called Sugarfish, no longer answers the phone. They don’t take reservations, so the only way of knowing how long a wait for a table is to show up and ask. When I lived in New York City, I got to know the woman who answered the phone at the Vietnamese restaurant I routinely ordered from so I didn’t have to say “light oil, please” every time I called. I’ve ordered from Sugarfish dozens of times, but if I forget to write “extra napkins” when I place my online order, I will receive exactly one napkin.
Technology has made it possible for companies to stop talking to their customers. Increasingly, I’m instructed to send an email or use “live chat,” after hearing this irritating message: “Did you know that answers to our most commonly asked questions can be found on our website?”
Even before the pandemic, technology was reducing human interactions, but Covid lockdowns accelerated the trend. One doesn’t have to be Freud to figure out that increased isolation is impairing the health of Americans.
Surveys show that as many as one in three Americans are suffering from depression, and not surprisingly given they’ve grown up with technology, children and young adults have become especially susceptible to melancholy and anxiety. Reading this recent profile of Musk, I couldn’t help conclude that he’s a very sad and lonely man, whose primary relationships are his Twitter followers and people who wouldn’t give him the time of day were it not for his wealth and celebrity. I feel sorry for Musk, his billions notwithstanding.
One of Musk’s utopian dreams is self-driving cars, a technology that he has repeatedly assured is near perfection, though the evidence suggests otherwise. It’s known that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is probing accidents involving Tesla’s Autopilot, including three fatal motorcycle mishaps that happened within 51 days of each other this past summer.
San Francisco’s transit bosses recently submitted a scathing 39-page letter to the NHTSA warning that autonomous vehicles operated by GM’s Cruise self-driving subsidiary were wreaking havoc on city streets and were so problem plagued they “could quickly exhaust emergency response resources and could undermine public confidence in all automated driving technology.”
The argument for self-driving cars is that supposedly technology would be less prone to driver errors than humans, an argument that’s debatable. Traffic deaths are rare, amounting to one person for about every 100 million miles, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Notably, fatal accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior—speeding, drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel.
According to this recent Bloomberg story that argued self-driving vehicles are an unrealizable pipedream, the real-world data suggests that autonomous cars have been involved in accidents more frequently than human-driven ones, with rear-end collisions being especially common.
Improving road safety and saving lives is an admirable goal, but if that’s the end game why not utilize already available technology and outfit cars with built-in breathalyzers that will disable a vehicle if they detect an intoxicated driver. Another lifesaving innovation would be to disable cell phones when a vehicle is moving.
Even if it was proven the self-driving cars were safer, I’d still have my concerns.
Driving takes considerable skill and judgment, requiring the utilization and integration of various sensory skills such as sight and sound and the physical engagement of the hands and feet. I wonder if automatic transmissions were ultimately progress; driving with a clutch and standard shift required even more skill and concentration. I drove a standard transmission for years, but it would take some time before I returned to my previous mastery of the technology. It’s not like riding a bicycle.
I have to imagine there are mind/body benefits to driving a car.
But the ultimate reason I hope self-driving never comes to fruition is that I enjoy driving. Operating my car gives me a feeling of empowerment; I’m in control and on an open road with little traffic I find driving liberating and exhilarating. It’s why I live in California.
Moreover, driving is a communal activity with occasional human interaction. If I cut you off in my Subaru, you will call me an a-hole. If my self-driving car cuts off your self-driving car, it would be up to our respective car computers to duke it out.
Technologists dream of a time when it will be possible to summon a driverless taxi, grab a coffee, pick up some groceries, and visit the doctor without any physical interaction. While that might be a utopian world to some, that’s my idea of a living hell.