TRANSCRIPT (by speechpad)
Hi. This is Jaime Escuder and welcome to another episode of None Sense.
I like to drive. I've always been kind of fascinated with mechanical things, and engines in particular are really fascinating. I just love the idea of having sort of a powerful thing like an engine under my control. And just the whole sensation of kind of moving through space quickly like that and, again, having that sort of power at one's command is just a lot of fun. I remember (my mother doesn't know this), I once went drag racing on the Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa just the one time (and I'm a lawyer now, so I think I feel safe talking about this because I know the statute of limitations has passed on this), but I just did it the one time but it was exhilarating and I'm not at all advocating that anyone do this, but the fact of the matter is in my final moments when my life flashes before my eyes I'm just gonna remember the sensation of that. But it's more than that.
There's a great deal in the U.S. actually that's just off limits, if you think about it. All these places we can't go. For example, where I live in Texas it's a very beautiful place and it's wide open with huge expanses, but it's all walled off and it's inaccessible to me unless I were willing to, you know, climb a fence or trespass or whatever. And, of course, other countries have different rules about this. Other countries have a lot more leniency with regard to people exploring. In fact, I think Finland is famous for having these rules of like this idea that wandering is allowed. And it's understood that you can kind of walk the country. It's your county and you can kind of walk it, and so long as you don't do damage or even allowed to sort of camp out on private property and stuff.
Well, you know, not here in the United States. We're not really allowed a lot of places. But the roads are public. You know, the roads are a place where you're allowed to be. And so I always kind of...even looking at a map, and I'm kind of obsessed with maps, looking at the roads, to me those lines indicate the zones of freedom that I'm allowed to explore in my car. And, you know, it's a big country, of course, that we live in, but really, if...and I've actually met people who've done this, if you wanted to, you could explore the whole country. You could explore, you know, Acadia National Park and the great, you know, coasts and shorelines of both coasts, and then the Rocky Mountains and the deserts. And an engine allows you to do that. And so the point is I like driving. And why am I talking about this? It's because I've talked before about artificial intelligence and all this stuff, but it seems to me that one of the things that we're really desperate or eager or just so focused on developing is this thing called the self-driving car.
In fact, just the other day I read an article about how Google has in fact developed a special kind of computer chip specifically developed to AI called a "tensor processing unit," which I don't know anything about other than I'm gathering that it's a very powerful computer chip. And the express purpose, one of the express purposes of developing these hyper-intelligent computer chips is to allow for driverless cars. So I just want to take a moment to pause and think about...and I think maybe the driverless car thing is a good kind of prism through which to look at this, but to think about what we give up for what we gained. Because I've noticed there's really a balance to everything in this universe and nothing is gained without something else being lost. And sometimes the things that are lost are worth it and maybe the tradeoff is worth it, but I always think it's a good idea to maybe think about that before we just rush headlong into one thing.
So driverless cars, I think the benefits are great. Right? We know that it'll reduce accidents, maybe even eliminate accidents. And you can read. Right? You could take a nap.
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