I have been thinking lately that I have only a very short time left to enjoy riding my motorcycle. As with so much that modern society is moving us toward, I feel forced into this position. And I don't like it. It has little to do with my age and even less to do with the war against the internal combustion engine. It's really about an immoral hubris on the part of technologists and an insidious loss of reasoning ability among the general population.

It was recently reported that Tesla's FSD (full self-driving) is improving rapidly. I am glad for Musk, from a success standpoint. Having just completed the reading of two different Musk biographies, I have a lot of respect for the man even while at the same time believing that a few of his oft-repeated objectives--particularly that of colonizing Mars and more recently and spectacularly exposing the human brain to outside manipulation--are patently crackers, and in the special case of Neuralink, breathtakingly and frighteningly, eminently destructive. One can't help but be impressed by the force of Musk's personality. He is a very smart and determined man. But this powerful individual is championing some very bad things.

Tesla's FSD and the other companys' auto driving tech is said to be still experiencing a number of "interventions" during each drive event. Completely aside from the fact that self-driving is a stupid idea that plainly demonstrates the reality of mass insanity--I mean this literally--interventions mean failures. The system might have got someone killed each time. And accidents are happening, though proponents of the technology have dismissed them as mere data that aids system development. And they defend this position--Musk himself said this at his recent Texas-venue shareholders' event, citing 40,000 deaths per year--that it is easy to make FSD safer than human driving because human driving is so inherently unsafe. This is a disturbing statement on two levels. First, that since we're taking about inside the car not outside, this is a depressingly deprecating assessment of man's car driving ability. And second, coming back again to man versus machine (or more accurately, man versus computer), it is another example of the extremely illogical preference for and trust in AI over man. Interestingly, laws are being established that potentially make the self-driving car manufacturer liable and not the driver, which simply snarls the issue even more. But even absent such failures as are being reported, do we really believe that cameras, radar and computers can equal the combination of moral choices, skill and intuition that make up driving a car? Aren't there hundreds of nuanced responses and decisions a human makes each time they operate a car that no computer can ever replicate? To deny that is astonishingly naive and it means believing man is himself just a machine. You would think that even the most hardened atheist would admit the existence of that part of a person that is definitively human and uniquely exempt from duplication. I sincerely fear for a humanity that is subject to the control and influence of the purveyors of this evil.

My riding days are numbered, and if I lived in a metro area they would be very brief indeed. And I am more saddened than ever that the world has plainly lost its mind.