Sample 1

The Self-Driving Lesson

Can you join me in a thought experiment? I want you to wonder what it would be like if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were sitting in the back seat of your car. Imagine them buckled up, powdered and periwigged. Maybe you’re having small talk with them about the Constitution, or perhaps you’re catching them up to speed on the past two hundred or so years of American history.

You can imagine your favorite kind of time-traveling dialogue: Did you just say there was a civil war - ah, I was afraid of that, I had a gentleman’s wager on it - that part’s up to you.

The key moment to imagine is when you reach the onramp to the interstate. Then, you slam the accelerator. You’re going from 30 mph to 50 mph to 70 mph. I think the first thing you’d hear from Washington or Jefferson would be a gasp. By Jove - slow down! Sweat stains would yellow their wigs. They’d look left, right, left, right, groping around the seat frantically for something steady to grip onto. The world would be coming at them much faster than it had ever come to them before on the back of a horse. At least that’s how I think it would go. It fits with my own experience of going faster than I could handle: I remember being sixteen, and during the first day of my behind-the-wheel driving, my instructor made me put the accelerator all the way to the floor until the speedometer inched up to 65 mph on a road with a speed limit of 35 mph, and it was a sensory overload: I felt every pebble of the road under that tin can.

I said that the Founding Fathers would gasp. But soon, they’d adapt. The swirl of scenery and cars would settle in their brains to something normal. The double yellow lines would start to make sense. They’d filter out the unnecessary things. 

This shows us something we do all the time: apply a filter to the world. I used the Founding Fathers as test dummies because we can imagine how a mind unaccustomed to the twenty-first century would have to adapt. We know that it would occur automatically. They wouldn’t have to tell themselves, Hmm, I can filter out the trees and sky, and look at a fixed point ahead with the yellow and white lines in my peripheral vision. Their minds would do it automatically. Their minds would find the 5% of the field of vision that really matters when driving.

You may have noticed that we apply filters everywhere. It’s the mode we’re in throughout our lives. Here’s one way to notice it.

Stop what you’re doing.

Breathe.

Notice the chair pressing against your back (and your poor posture). Feel your tongue pressing against the roof of your mouth. Sense your socks on your feet. If you’re on a park bench, you might start noticing the thousands of leaves and the dozens of people you would never have stopped to notice. If you’re looking at your phone, you might feel its grip in your palm or the shape of your screen for the first time since you bought it. Try noticing your nose: it turns out it’s always hanging out down there at the bottom of your field of vision. These sensations may be coming into your system all at once: but you're biased not to pay attention to them. These things get automatically filtered out. Now think about the other things that you’re filtering out. These are things that you casually ignore almost all the time: the sound of air blowing through your vents - the unfinished paint job in your kitchen - the clutter on your desk - the whispering of your own breathing. If you’re in New York, you might filter out the faces of perhaps a thousand people as you walk to a deli, until all of a sudden you notice your old piano teacher eating a bagel. You don’t gawk at every skyscraper like a tourist who’s visiting your city for the first time. Your mind has adapted. It has found the 1% of your surroundings that really matter to you.

Yet some things you can’t filter out. Imagine that the person serving you at the deli is not wearing any clothes - top, bottom, or anywhere in between. How could you not notice that? You’re wired to notice a naked person whether you want to or not. Or, how about a $100 bill? Or, what about a puma prowling your lawn, or the words of someone talking about you behind your back, or a woman in a red dress?

Now I wonder if that should give us pause. It seems that something is picking and choosing what we pay attention to. This something is not us. Or, if it is us, it is an automatic part of us. It is a part over which we have only limited control. 

You can also notice this limitation of control in what we want. If you were to put a video camera in front of a random passerby on the street, and ask them, What is it you want in life? I think they’d say something like this: I just want everyone to live in peace with one another. I want everyone to treat each other fairly and to get along with one another and be happy. That is what most people would say, I think. It’s what their consciences would tell them to say to the camera. I don’t think they’d have the words to list off all the other desires that come to us automatically, but we immediately recognize them when we see them on a slip of paper in a fortune cookie, or in our horoscope. We all want to get to the next rung up. We want to be part of the inner circle. Deep within is a desire to be one of the gang. We want to be approved. To achieve status. To be not alone. We want to see our children thriving. All of us long to be loved. I don’t think that the person on the street would confess to the camera that whenever she is in a meeting, her eyes read the room to make sure she’s in the inner circle. I don’t think she’d realize that one of the reasons why she was parroting the words, I just want everyone to live in peace with one another is because what she wants is to say the right thing to make sure that she fits in, and so that anyone who sees her on YouTube won’t call her up or chew her out on social media. But how many of us are actually aware of what happens in our minds in a split second? Aren’t these algorithms working under our conscious minds? 

Again, the important thing is that we’re noticing something over which we have little control. It’s not we who are choosing filters, but some part of us. If we’re not fully in control of what we’re paying attention to or wanting, what is? Is it a part of ourselves? Is it part of the brain? Or something very primitive? 

It appears, at least, to be ancient. Remember what we can’t filter out: nakedness, gossip, and escaped zoo animals. They’re as arresting to us as they were to hunter-gatherers. They have to do procreation, belonging, and survival.

The Self

This filtering personality I am calling the “self.” It deserves a name like this, for it is something that is “I” and not conscious, something that is both part of us and yet not in our control. If we could place a number on its domination, it would look something like this. It has been estimated that 11 million bits of information enter into our sensory perception per second - and that we are only focused on 16 bits of it. The rest of it gets filtered out. This is an almost 1:1,000,000 ratio. That is why when I say that this is a self-driving lesson, I don’t mean that we are driving; I mean that we are being driven.

Let me repeat: we’re not driving the car as much as being driven. I think that we may be fortunate in many ways that self-driving cars are now a possibility: not only do we have access to a safer mode of travel, but we also have a first-rate metaphor for the human condition. For we are, undoubtedly, like cars in autopilot mode. We’re plowing forward in search of what only God knows: the self’s algorithms cause us to go in these directions before we’re conscious of them.

I suspect some of you may have a hard time with this self-driving lesson. I can hear someone saying, You know what? I think your picture of autopilot is a scare tactic. You’re frightening people into thinking there’s something defective, so you can gaslight them into your moral position. I want to be careful. I’m not trying to make you afraid. The position we should take is distrust. You know what this feels like. You’ve noticed yourself wanting things that you don’t want to want, and doing things you don’t want to do, and paying attention to things that you don’t want to pay attention to. There’s something in you that’s steering you in the wrong directions. I don’t think you should be upset for automatically paying attention to a puma on your lawn or a woman in a red dress. However, it’s likely that you’ve felt trapped at some point in your life by either anxiety or lust. I also think that if you take a look at the ads on your phone, you’ll soon find that the overwhelming majority of them have to do with fear, disgust, nakedness, gossip, and the political equivalent of a puma on your lawn. Politicians bombard us with ads shaped to appeal to our autopilots in the worst way possible. YouTubers get clicks with giant faces looking excited next to $100 bills; news almost has to say SHOCKING or BREAKING NEWS to get you to read; everything has turned into a war over 0.2 seconds of your attention. Survival in the marketplace depends upon how a company can hack into our autopilots. For none of this do we ever have to think about: all we have to do is click without making a decision.

It does no good to deny that this is happening. We can’t be like that lady who’s always on the news. She’s standing on her front stoop, puffing a Marlboro. The reporter asks her about her neighbor who just robbed a bank at gunpoint. I just can’t believe it, she’ll say. I’ve known him my whole life, and never in a million years could I have imagined what he did. It can’t be real. You figure that whatever her neighbor did was so out of character that she’ll never know how to process it. She’ll always believe that the “real” neighbor was the one who she saw getting the mail and walking the dog each morning at 8:00, and so whatever unconscious mechanism led him to lead a double life she’ll never comprehend, but it was someone else, and not her real nextdoor neighbor. Her mind can’t put the two together. It’s easier to deny it. She has no way of coming to terms with reality. Up until this point, she had only seen one side of him, and the other side was easier not to see.

However, whatever we pretend doesn’t exist, will still exist. It will continue to operate, only in darkness.

The problem, then, is this. We have in our nature a tendency that we hardly notice that operates behind the scenes to bend our perception of the world toward aims that we didn’t choose.

It’s like we’re sitting in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel, but the car’s already steering away from anxiety – toward safety – toward being one of the gang – left, right, left, left – toward a bigger house – away from pain – toward being that person that we wanted to be ever since we started to dream big – right, right, left, right – toward our same protective routine. This self-driving mechanism keeps us safe and alive. But what if it steers us away from where we should go?