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Fully Self Driving

8/28/2026

We just got a new Tesla, primarily to take advantage of its self-driving capability. Waymo and Zoox (i.e., Google and Amazon) are rolling out their commercial/taxi versions around the country and, indeed, in our corner of San Francisco, they’re a pretty common sight. Many car companies offer some self-driving capability for private vehicles as well, but Tesla’s is (at this writing and in terms of what’s available in the US) by far the most sophisticated. So, notwithstanding any feelings about Elon’s empire, we made the jump.

It's pretty amazing. I can dictate a destination location into the navigation system, hit the “self-drive” button and away we go. The car will back itself out of the driveway get to wherever I’m headed and park itself at the destination. Barring complications, there’s no need to touch the steering wheel or foot pedals. It works on highways, city streets, and country back roads. I can set it to five different levels of speed/aggressiveness, depending on the circumstances and my urgency. The higher two levels regularly exceed the speed limit (but, presumably, not the safe driving capabilities of the car). I have heard of people being pulled over for speeding and trying to blame the vehicle (“Send the ticket to Musk!”); but I can’t imagine any cop buying that one.

Tesla insists that this mode must be “fully supervised” (i.e., you cant take a nap, read a book, or otherwise zone-out). There’s an interior camera that uses an AI algorithm to see if you’re nodding off or taking your eyes off the road; if so, it will beep at you and, eventually, steer the car off to a safe stop. If you commit three minor infractions in a week, it will disable the self-driving capability for a week.

I’m sure there are other aspects of its capabilities, but overall, we’ve been pretty impressed.

As a guy who grew up in the Detroit area in the mid-20C, where everything was about cars, the current state of automotive capabilities is a revelation. Back in the day, significant technical innovations were pretty limited. The introduction of cruise control occurred primarily in the 1950s and ‘60s and became a pretty standard feature shortly thereafter. I have to say that I never liked it and hardly used it. It seemed like an invitation to not pay attention and since the rest of the operation of the vehicle required me to steer, brake, etc., this seemed like a bad idea. This 2026 version, of course, doesn’t really require me to engage in those mundane aspects of driving, so the risk of not paying attention seems much smaller.

Since this is the real world and not some simulator or test track, the question inevitably comes up as to how it would handle the crises, quirks, and complexities of driving. I don’t feel particularly concerned. The system undoubtedly has faster reactions than I do, so I suspect that in the usual kind of crises (e.g. dog running into the street from between two parked cars or yielding to an ambulance coming up from behind), it would handle it as well as I could. In a more complex but less urgent situation (e.g., stuck on a one-way street), I can always turn the system off and manually handle it. The other day, driving in the left lane on a crowded highway, as a motorcyclist came up behind us (weaving between two lanes), the car scooted a bit to the left so that there was enough room for the cyclist to proceed without risk of us bumping into each other, then it scooted back to the center of our lane. The only such glitch we’ve noticed is that it once ran over a dead skunk in the middle of the road, rather than swerve around it.

This kind of capability raises all sorts of questions about how we humans accommodate and adapt to technology. We’re in the middle of a tidal wave of such changes now, as I have commented in regard to general AI capabilities. Indeed, the self-driving system is an important example of applied AI. The statistics based on Waymo and similar experiences show that automatic driving (a term I like better than “self-driving” since there is no “self” involved!) is considerably safer than the average human. So, I expect that the technology will continue to develop and will become the default mode of driving within the next decade.

Will we lose the ability to drive? Search engines have made it less important to remember stuff. Other modes of AI are supplanting many people’s willingness to learn, think, and write. These are only the most recent steps in the myriad ways in which technology has been supplanting basic human functions. (When was the last time you made a fire to cook your food, rather than twisting a knob or pressing a button on your range/oven?) Alternatively, will those born this year ever get behind a wheel and will they look at each other and roll their eyes at their parents/grandparents’ stories that begin with “back in the day, when we had to drive ourselves….”?

On the other hand, what will they do if the system breaks? Will they be glad to know someone who still knows how to drive? We could ask the same about calculators and computers. I can still do math in my head and on paper, but I suspect these are dying arts. Similarly, I feel comfortable driving and I don’t use the system very much.

My wife, on the other hand, loves it and feels more secure relying on the system rather than her own abilities. It’s great to see her lower level of anxiety.

And so, we proceed boldly into the future. Buckle up

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21C Empires

8/21/2026

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21C Empires

Empires—at least the formal, flag-planting variety—pretty much came apart at the seams in the course of the vast changes of the 20C. There has been an ongoing debate as to whether the age of empire is over. Or, has it merely morphed? If we start from the premise that empire is all about the projection of power by one people over another, how does this fit our contemporary world?

Well, first, the nature of power has changed. It’s a far different mix of physical coercion, economic pressures, and cultural cajolery than we started with or even than how we might well describe the pinnacle of American power in the later 20C. Second, the list of national players has shifted. Third, the relationship of states, societies, and their components is different, too; which raises the question of whether, when we refer to a “people” projecting their power, we might not have to rethink that aspect as well.

If we look at the list of the principal empires of the modern (post 15C) era: Portugal and Spain, Britain and France, China, Japan and Germany, and Soviet Union and the US, the list starts from the premise of territoriality, both in terms of the group of people upon which imperial power might be exercised and in terms of how the power is exercised. The idea of informal empires exercising economic and cultural power that can work without regard to territory is hardly new. And, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from living with telecommunications, as we have for almost two hundred years, now compounded by the internet and other aspects of the digital era, it’s that distance and geography don’t matter nearly so much as they used to. At a geopolitical level, we can see this when we consider the cheap drones which Ukraine uses to disrupt Moscow. We can see it in the complex—and almost entirely electronically implemented system of financial sanctions which the US and other countries use as a non-violent means of warfare.

Of course, the “atomic age” changed the nature of coercive power, but the development of rocket/missile/drone technologies have extended the range of coercion far beyond the nominal battlefield. Other technologies of destruction, EMP, chemical and biological agents, cyberwarfare now enable not only the leading military countries to harm their opponents in a variety of ways, but, more importantly, the reduced cost of developing and deploying these technologies has dramatically expanded the number of countries that can wreak havoc with enemy societies. We need look no further than North Korea and Ukraine for current examples.

However, the power to destroy is different than the power to conquer. So, those with such tools in their arsenals can threaten and coerce their opponents with destruction (which might be quite effective from a defensive perspective), but those tools can do very little to enable their wielders to control, much less incorporate, other societies. So, again, there’s a significant difference between raw power and that which is useful for imperial purposes.

We can see this in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its fourth year. Leaving Putin’s ego to the side, along with his aspirations to revive the Imperial Russian and Soviet empires, we can look at this episode in terms of the potential expansion of a 21C Russian empire. What would have been the result of a successful invasion in 2022? Putin thought that his troops would be welcomed and that ethic Russians and even some ethnic Ukrainians would have pitched in to help construct this new empire.
Indeed, both in terms of social control and the accumulation of economic power, one of the hallmarks of our age is the shift towards ephemeral configurations of electrons—i.e., data—as an asset type. Data-mining isn’t like bauxite mining; it can happen anywhere, not merely a function of geological happenstance. And, whether in terms of warfare, finance, or social behavior, it is a powerful factor, but one that is not easily susceptible to anyone’s imperial control.

More broadly, companies, multi-national corporations are a larger part of the global map of power than ever. The VOC of the 17C, the British banks of the 19C, IBM and Coca-Cola in the 20C were relative rarities. Further, they each acknowledged—more-or-less—a territorial sovereign. There are more such enterprises now and their willingness to submit to a single imperium is considerably less.

That is not to say that companies are becoming their own empires. If the concept means anything, it has to be more than just person A exercising power over person B. In other words, just because companies may be more powerful doesn’t make them “empires.”

All this leads to one possible answer; which is that the age of empires is over. It’s a concept that was a useful way of thinking about power and geopolitics for thousands of years, but, as with dynasties and nationalism, is best used only historically. However, since we can’t predict the future, we have to allow for the possibility that we are in an interregnum and a new imperial format and age will be along soon enough. After all, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed: “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by;” an idealistic hope which the last 100 years has certainly not borne out. In the meantime, we have the US as an ailing imperial/global hegemon and the rising power of East Asia embodied in China.

Are the new isolationists of the MAGA/America First bent really anti-imperialist, or is the wolf merely changing out of his sheep’s clothing into something new? Regardless of who is steering the ship from Washington, it seems like the post-WWII Pax Americana is no longer with us. Whether China is ready and able to fully resume its global rank and how it might project that power beyond its region and fully across the world will have to be the topic of a later posting.

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Destandardization

8/14/2026

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There’s been a fair amount of buzz lately about grade inflation. It’s endemic in our schools—both at high schools and colleges. It’s also present in our society at large in a couple of ways; one of which is merely tedious, the other more symptomatic of the way social relations tend, over time, to undermine “standards,” leading to a broader diagnosis of social decadence.

The first of the social aspects is the superficial dilution of meaning resulting from our media-drenched, advertising-driven society. Superlatives are overused to the point of meaninglessness. We’ve run out of synonyms for ‘bigger and better.’ Merely “super” can’t hold a candle to “ultra,” “hyper,” “mega,” and “ultimate.” I call on the linguists of the world to come up with some new adjectives so we can differentiate the various grades of soap-induced cleanliness, internet speeds, and pizzas. It’s confusing and tiresome, but this is the fluff of our modern consumer culture.

A second social aspect shows up in the titles of people who work in large organizations. There was a time when to be a bank “Vice-President” was a big deal. Now, at the top ten US banks, there are more than 250,000 people with that title or higher. The situation is similar in the government. Before WWII, fewer than 40 people were at the rank of “Assistant Secretary” or higher. By 1975, that number had quintupled and since then, it has tripled again, so that we now have 500-600 senior bureaucrats who are entitled to a 17-gun salute. It’s a similar story in the US military. Before WWII, we had about 160 Generals (or other one-star equivalents), by the end of the Vietnam War we had almost 1200, with a dip since then to about 900. (and the ratio of generals to total troop levels has almost doubled!).

This title-inflation is not new, Samuel Finer, in his macro-study of governments 30 years ago, described this phenomenon as going back thousands of years. We’ve just taken it to a new level. Part of the growth is due to the increased complexity and scope of activity of both commercial and governmental organizations.

However, I suspect that a good portion is due to social dynamics. Everybody likes to have a bigger and better title. It’s almost always easier to “pay” people with a title than with money or actual power. So, instead of populating lower ranks with more responsibility, we give away shiny new titles. Necessarily, these are worth relatively less since there’s more of them and status is usually a function of exclusivity. Then we have to create more senior titles to have room to promote people who used to be what has become a relatively lowly rank of “vice-president;” thus the profusion of “senior,” “executive,” “senior executive,” and similar adjectival enhancements (not to mention the relatively recent spawning of the “C-suite”).

There’s something similar at work in academia. Across the country, high school GPAs have risen from 2.5 to about 3.25 over the past 75 years (mostly in the last 20 years). A recent study at Harvard showed that 60% of grades were “A”s as compared with 25% at the turn of the century. If this were consumer prices, the Federal Reserve would have clamped down a long time ago.

There are multiple dynamics at work here. Public high schools and colleges are under tremendous pressure to “deliver” graduates. So, in a perverse sense, “failure is not an option.” If “barely acceptable” performance is expected to “earn” a “C/C+” in order to ensure that students could graduate, then decent performance would thus be due at least a B- or a B. This didn’t leave very much room to distinguish between different performance levels among the better students.

When I was grading at SF State, I went along with the University average, which was a B-. I wasn’t happy about it, but I wasn’t going to penalize my students for my (archaic) standards if they were competing with others whose professors were using easier grading scales than I did. In addition, no one wanted to increase the chances of unhappy students or irate parents (they were our “customers,” after all). It was much easier to avoid the potential conflict of rigorous assessment. The entire system was perverted and, in the end, certainly did not benefit students who emerged with an increasingly worthless sheepskin.

At more “elite” schools, the spin is different. There is an inbuilt assumption of student capability. I’m sure at Harvard, they would argue that of course their students did work at the “A” level. After all, they had gotten into Harvard. Regardless, of the rationalization, the result is the same: watering down of standards. I’m reminded of the famous picture from Germany in the 1920s, with people pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash down the street to buy their groceries. Part of the reason that a college degree isn’t worth what it used to (even if it costs a lot more to procure) is that it doesn’t signify as much. Employers are appalled and have to ratchet down their expectations of what a 3.5 GPA would mean in terms of skill level.

Even universities are appalled (at least their admissions offices). High school grades don’t mean much anymore. For a while, standardized testing was seen as a useful complement to GPAs in predicting collegiate success, but those tests were frequently tossed aside over the past couple of decades as being biased against students from more challenging environments. This left college admissions pretty much at sea (or at least at C+!). Lately, however, the tests have been making a comeback, in part because the system needs some standards to evaluate the deluge of applicants.

This can’t end well. If we look at the global history of devalued currency (not just Germany in the 1920s), many countries ended up tossing their old denominations (too many zeros) and recasting their currencies with new names and new banknotes. A central bank could do this since it controlled the entire system. There’s no cohesion across our 20,000+ of high schools or our almost 4,000 colleges. Even if they could get it together, any attempt to institute a new standard would likely be challenged in court and never implemented. As to institutional title inflation, there is even less hope.

I guess it’s pretty normal that older folks bemoan the dilution of the standards under which they (I) grew up. That doesn’t make it wrong.

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Pivot Point

8/7/2026

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Pivot Point

I’ve talked in the past about how we usually frame history in chronological chunks (e.g., the 18C, the “inter-war” period, the reign of Louis XIV, the T’ang dynasty). This periodization is often a useful way to capture a key set of events and developments, but it can also delude us into thinking that such periods were definitive and lead us to miss out on insights from looking at the world in a different way. In the course of preparing my current lectures on Modern Empires, I stumbled across one such case involving America, globalization, and the ebbing of empires.

Most of us were brought up to think of the 20C, at least in geopolitical terms, as being defined by the three great wars: WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. America’s victory in all three sealed, or so it seemed at the time, the triumph of the Western liberal democratic way of life and left the US as the sole “superpower,” indeed the only country that had any claim to imperial status. Historians thus frame a “short 20C” that ran from 1918 to 1991. There is certainly something to this way of looking at history. But I would like to suggest that in the middle of this grand American parade of progress, we might find an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of American dominance. It would take several decades to play out—indeed, it is happening before our eyes—and we don’t know where it will lead.

Let’s take a close look at an interesting conjuncture of events in 1971-75 that some historians count as more significant than we have traditionally seen. These events, coming right on top of each other, highlight the limitations of US power. Only one of these, the “Oil Shock” coming in reaction to the latest round of the Arab-Israeli War, was externally imposed. The others—both economic and geopolitical—represented the decisions of the Nixon Administration as to how to handle the largest international relations issues of the period.

First, in 1971, the US faced the economic pressures of the Vietnam War (of which more shortly), as well as the long-term accumulation of challenges of being the world’s financial guarantor. We took drastic action, imposing wage and price controls domestically, but more importantly for our point here, we stepped back from a commitment to convert US dollars into gold. In so doing, we acknowledged that our global financial leadership/dominion which had been in place since the end of WWII was at an end. In effect, we couldn’t afford to backstop the international monetary system anymore.

The Oil Shock was a stark reminder that the American economy—both abstractly and in terms of day-to-day lives—was fully connected to the actions of others in the world and that we were not fully in control of our destiny. We were less independent and more interdependent than we liked to think.

Similarly, by opening diplomatic relations with China (1972), shifting towards a policy of détente with the Soviet Union (1972-4), and extricating ourselves from the Vietnam War (1972-75), we marked the new shape and scope of American power. Yes, we might be the most powerful country in the world; but we were not all-powerful. It’s worth noting that Henry Kissinger, who was a scholar of diplomatic history and knew the importance of realpolitik, was steering a lot of these decisions. He knew that the mythology of American hegemony was not sustainable as a basis of real-world policy decisions.

These geopolitical shifts would become more fully manifest over time. We would go on to win the Cold War, China’s return to the front row of world power would only become evident in the 21C, the “almighty dollar” continues today to be central to global finance; but in a certain sense, the American Empire reached its apogee in the early 1970s. I will address this issue in greater detail this fall when I talk on “The Rise and Fall of America,” suffice it to say here that the re-awakenings in East Asia and Southwest Asia that are playing out as we speak, can find a starting point in these events.

Extracting this set of events from an extraordinarily tumultuous period (don’t forget the Munich Olympics, Watergate, and disco), also lets us see something important about the nature of empires in the 21C. Traditionally, most empires developed independently. Especially from an economic perspective, the limited globalization of the pre-modern period meant that countries could plausibly operate on their own. Yes, there was cultural sharing and military conflict, but it wasn’t until the end of the 19C that economic interdependence became an important aspect of a great power’s affairs. We in the US pretty much blew off most of the rest of the world until that time. However, across the 20C, improvements in transportation, communications, and military technologies wove us closer together. We saw that the collapse of European empires in the middle of the 20C reflected in part their inability to maintain control in a world in which everyone could jostle everyone else everywhere. The Soviets came to this conclusion for their own empire late in the century. The US, which was rich enough and innovative enough to carry on, did so, as we just noted, into the 1970s when it accelerated a shift to what we call “informal” empire; a more complex deployment of our power across a range of arenas and geographic areas.

This interpretation is a great example of why historians insist on distinguishing their studies from “current events” and the daily news cycles. It’s really hard to see—in the moment—the significance of what is happening; which developments playing out before our eyes will be remembered 20, 70, or 170 years hence, much less what they all mean.

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Fully Self Driving

21C Empires

Destandardization

Pivot Point

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

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Fully Self Driving

21C Empires

Destandardization

Pivot Point

Condemned to Repeat It --Musings on history, society, and the world.

Archives

Sign up for alerts when there's a new post

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.