Mom Wanted A Chauffeured Rolls

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.

As do you.

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.