Or at least used to joke that she did.
“When you boys are older,” she would tell my brother and me, “that’s what I want you to get me.”
We’d laugh; and I did once get her a pretty expensive model.
But are you kidding me? A real Rolls costs $366,000 plus tax. Plus a fortune to garage, insure, and maintain.
And a chauffeur’s salary and benefits? Yikes! (And what do you do when the chauffeur is sick or on vacation or wants a day off? Or when you travel?)
My mother never got her car-and-driver.
But I’ve scrimped and saved . . . and now I have one on call 24/7.
And it will soon be cheaper, because no driver — or gasoline — will be required. And little insurance (driverless cars will rarely crash).
This is why you have to do two things:
1. Find an hour to watch Tony Seba’s talk on the coming clean energy disruption. It’s already 18 months old, so none of this is new — you know some of this stuff, for sure — but I’d be amazed if it doesn’t grab you.
We are alive at the climactic moment for the species — 10 or 20 years being barely a moment in the context of 10,000 human generations — when we’ll either figure out how to live together in the undreamed of prosperity technology is making possible . . . or else hurtle off the rails, done in by either that technology or by ourselves.
2. Read Part 3 of Andrew Yang’s afore-recommended The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Parts 1 and 2 explain why there will soon be almost no jobs, at least of the sort we have today. Part 3 begins a robust and pretty wonderful discussion of what to do about that.
One way to look at the ever-accelerating onrush of technology is with fear. But it’s a lot more fun to look at the future with excitement . . . identifying the huge challenges and changes that loom and devising ways to live happily ever after.
