Autonomous Nuclear Powered Vampires
A Plea to Stop Worrying About Weird Things
As I said last week, I did most of my writing on the internet way back in the early days of mass adoption, when people were still connecting via WebTV or Mindspring CDs. And way back then I discovered the Holy Grail of writing on the internet: mailbags. Before they became one of the staples of internet discourse, I reveled in them. Being able to briefly opine on a handful of topics instead of creating 2,500 meticulously and thought-out words on one thing? And a large amount of the words are just reprinting someone’s question? Sign me up!
Unfortunately, this is still not well read enough for a mailbag. But, I did receive a question in one of the comments that I felt deserved its own piece. So here is Substack 2021 Commenter of the Year1 and proprietor of Through a Hedge Backward Erin E with some thoughts about nuclear energy:
I really hope people get their heads out of their asses about nuclear energy. Yeah there are some notable disasters in the past. But compared to other types of energy? I mean come on. Maybe this isn’t a great comparison, but it makes me think of self-driving cars. Yeah there have been a couple accidents, but compared to human drivers? It’s not even close. So now we’re getting the tech in drips and drabs (auto parallel parking, auto emergency breaking, some semi self driving features) to ease all the butt beads into the tech. Which, fine. But how do we ease into nuclear energy? Your reactor is running or it ain’t.
This is, in fact, a pretty great comparison. And it serves as a wonderful jumping off point into one of the great obstacles of technological progress.
Due to a series of poorly made decisions, I somehow ended up with a career as a car crash lawyer. You know the ones, they advertise on television. A far cry from all the academic work on federal courts and treaty law I did in law school. One of the side effects of this unchosen career is that I am daily reminded of how dangerous it is to drive. Between the daily interaction with people suffering from serious injuries or involved in fatal crashes to the seminars on driving that we attend, I can safely offer the expert opinion that humans suck at operating automobiles. In 2019, 37,595 people died in America alone from traffic fatalities. That’s not a large percentage in a country with our population. But that’s still a lot of dead people. Every year that’s more deaths than US military deaths in the Korean War. What we nicely call “accidents” – a bullshit euphemism if ever there was one – of which automobile ones are the most common, is the leading cause of death for every age cohort until you hit 45. Even then it’s a major cause for anyone who isn’t a senior. This is a big deal. And no one cares.
I’m barely exaggerating. No one cares. In 2019, an evil person walked into a Wal-Mart in El Paso and shot and killed 23 people. This was national news. I had friends texting to ask me if I was okay, which if you’re familiar with the geography of Texas is hilarious.2 Two years earlier, an evil person decided he really needed to send a text message while driving and killed 13 people on a church bus outside San Antonio. How many of you remember that? No one cares.
Unless, of course, it’s a self-driving car. Remember this story about the tragic death of an Arizona woman who was jaywalking and hit by a self-driving vehicle? Yet, weirdly, none of the deaths I dealt with from that exact same month made national news. The same senators who want to launch investigations into Tesla deaths don’t seem to launch many investigations into non-Tesla deaths. A few months ago I spoke with someone in a Tesla death case, but that was because the driver was drunk and speeding. No automation, no problem. Except for the family of the dead man.
Since people love using 9/11 as a metric of deaths, if self-driving vehicles were still 90% as dangerous as human driven ones, we would save a 9/11 a year just in America. So why don’t we care? Why is Erin right and we hold autonomous vehicles and nuclear power to one standard while human drivers and coal get a pass? There’s a reason here, and let’s look at opposite ends of the importance spectrum to figure it out.
On the one hand we have the most important of all the unimportant things: sports. As always, don’t worry if you know nothing about sports, we’re using it as a lens on society. As many of you know, the most popular sporting event is the World Cup. In 2014 eight billion gajillion people watched it.3 Although the enduring memory of that event was Germany humiliating Brazil, a close second was when controversial Uruguayan superstar Luis Suarez got hungry for Italian. See below.
This was hugely controversial and resulted in a massive four month ban from any soccer activity, even walking into a stadium.4 A few days earlier this happened:
The fact that a shaky recording off TV was the best I could get sums it up. If you gave someone the choice between having someone bite your shoulder and not break the skin or having someone headbutt you in the face, you choose the former. One is obviously more violent and likely to cause harm. Likewise, you’d choose the nibble over a cleated stomp on your leg, or any of the broken bones or torn ligaments from run of the mill in game violence. So why the international freakout and severe penalties for one and the general shrug and lack of punishment for the other?
To find that answer, let’s go to the opposite end of the serious scale and discuss war, death, and genocide. And if the World Cup is the most important of the unimportant things, World War II is the most important of the important things. This was the cataclysmic event in human history. The death toll is mind-boggling. This is not an exact science, but you could take the death toll from World War I and combine it with the Mongol Conquests and still not equal the Second World War. The scale of death on the Eastern Front is so large it’s impossible to wrap your head around. Yet, if you talk about the horrors of WWII, the first thing that comes to the average person’s mind is the atomic bombs or the concentration camps. Rightly so, as these were horrifying events. Yet, Hiroshima may not even have been the deadliest bombing of the war. As for the Holocaust, there may be nothing more soul wrenching than the concentration camps. Whether the comprehensiveness of the Holocaust Museum, the graphic portrayal of Schindler’s List, or the simple words on the page of something like the documentary evidence of the Nuremberg Trials, it’s impossible to not be haunted by them. There is life before knowing about the concentration camps and life after, but they are never the same. Yet, it’s estimated that they weren’t even responsible for the majority of Jewish deaths. It’s likely more Jews were murdered by gunshot than by gas chamber. So why do the fire-bombings of Germany and Japan and the roving SS murder squads not play a larger role in our collective consciousness?
From soccer shenanigans to nuclear war and the Holocaust may be the most jarring tonal shift I’ve ever composed. But there’s a reason behind it. Whether we’re processing something as silly as Luis Suarez nibbling on a guy or the civilization altering horrors of WWII, the cognitive patterns we fall into are the same. One of those patterns is habituation. Our mind focuses more on new things than something we’re used to. A soccer player headbutts another? Big deal, happens all the time, not even the best one from a World Cup. But someone going around acting like a vampire?! Wow, that sticks in the brain. History lesson after history lesson of bombings and roving murder squads? Eh, it all blends together, shit I could see this on Al Jazeera. The only instance of nuclear weapon use? Mechanized murder machines? How would someone ever forget that? Some poor bastard dies in a car crash? Eh, it’s an “accident,” happens all the time. A computerized two-tons of steel death machine plows into a pedestrian? My God, the robot apocalypse is coming!5
This cognitive bias is a problem when we talk about technology because we’re typically talking about new technologies, thus, things our minds are not used to. Let’s go back to Erin’s question. Think about the horrors of Chernobyl. Although the actual death toll is hotly debated, the official U.N. number is 50. Also in 1986, 89 coal miners died in the United States alone. We can of course speculate how many people may have had reduced life expectancy due to Chernobyl – by far the worst nuclear incident ever – but we can also speculate how many coal miners died much later than 1986. I’ve heard it isn’t great on the lungs.
But, you say, although it’s sad that coal miners die at least that is limited to those in the mine. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima – these all endangered those around the facilities. That’s a good point. Remember Three Mile Island? I don’t, I wasn’t alive. But I am from Pennsylvania and everyone I know older than me remembers it. The government had to evacuate a 20-mile radius around the facility! Everyone was terrified. Thankfully, no one died. Maybe people in West Virginia similarly remember Buffalo Creek, but it’s not exactly in the American shared consciousness.6 Likewise, my combination of epistemic humility and slothfulness prevent me from digging through all the literature to determine the exact number of people who die each year from air pollution. But it’s in the millions.
Often, proponents of autonomous driving or nuclear power will chalk up their difficulties to America’s obsession with safety. But what obsession? If we were actually obsessed with safety, we’d outlaw coal tomorrow and take genuine steps to make roads safer. Drunk driving? Distracted driving?7 Reckless driving? Speeding? If we cared about safety maybe we’d care about those things. But we don’t. It’s not safety that makes people freak out about self-driving cars and nuclear reactors. It’s cognitive bias. It’s that they’re weird.
Here’s the part where I should offer a solution but, if I had that, I’d probably spend my days getting paid a lot of money by tech companies and not grinding out a living chasing ambulances. Regretfully, I am not going to be able to change human cognitive abilities. Instead, we just need to talk about these problems. Remember, literally every single thing in your life was – at some point – weird. Think about how bizarre it must have been the first time someone talked. You’re telling me that it didn’t stick in people’s heads the first time someone cooked food? And I guarantee that at some point in every community there was someone known as “That Weird Guy Who Poops Inside.” Eventually they stop being weird, just like a human driving a steel killing machine or people burning prehistoric garbage stopped being weird and became an accepted part of life. So, keep on (self-driving) trucking and eventually these technologies will be held to the same standard as everything else. Because as nice as it would be to have a simple solution to this, sometimes we just need to acknowledge that humans are going to act like humans.
Probably.
One of the banes of existence of everyone who moves to Texas is that no one back home (unless home is Alaska) will appreciate how gigantic this place is. Also, constantly missing the first hour of sporting events because someone texts me the wrong time that it’s on. But maybe that’s specific to me.
I originally wrote this number as a reminder to go and find the actual number. But, although that proved more difficult than I had hoped, that number is pretty close to accurate. Estimates are the 2014 World Cup was watched by at least three billion people, and was arguably the most watched event in human history. Which I suppose would make it the most important of the most important of the unimportant things.
Back when I was still active on social media under my own name I caught a lot of flak for my response to this because it was also when I first coined the phrase “Outrage Machine.” Coincidentally, this is around the time the Outrage Machine started working overtime. But there are few better examples of the outrage machine than the bloviating that serious commentators did over this action ruining their lovely little tournament. Oddly, the forcible eviction of 170,000 people from their homes to build the stadiums with public money didn’t bother them.
Just two weeks ago I swore I would never frame an article around a movie. But I probably could’ve done that this week. That’s because this little monologue by Heath Ledger’s character – The Joker – in the obscure Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight is a wonderfully delivered expression of this idea.
As an ambulance chaser I’m well-aware of this disaster, and the very well written book about the attempts to recover for the families of the victims. Of course, always remember that personal injury attorneys are reviled and yet the attorneys who represent the companies that killed 125 people and left 90% of the town homeless are paragons of society.
Again, not an exaggeration when I say no one cares. Last year I had a case where the Defendant was driving 80 and using Snapchat and didn’t notice the road curved, leading to him driving head on into my clients. His social media – both before and after the wreck – was replete of selfies while driving. His punishment? He had to do an online defensive driving seminar. No one cares.
It’s difficult to get people to support something that reduces total deaths but directly causes some deaths that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. An example is the vaccine. Covid kills many people, but the idea of a vaccine killing one person who might have otherwise been fine (if she never got vaccinated) is unacceptable to us.
First, I’m humbled and honored.
Second, hilariously I meant “butt heads” but it got autocorrected to “butt beads” but I suppose that works too.
Third, love all the World Cup stuff. I remember that so clearly, but you’re totally right. It’s not even that big of a deal. It just FELT like one.
Over the past two days I’ve had an email exchange with someone who won’t engage with the complex questions I asked (about something she specifically invited pushback on) but instead says I’m discounting her lived experience. But, from that standpoint, any questions or suggestion that maybe one’s perception of an experience could be seen differently is just violence or whatever. Unlike all those “accidents.”