I want a self-driving car so badly it hurts.

But there’s one frequent claim I often see from proponents of self-driving cars: That they’ll usher in an era of autonomous taxis which will cause the personal ownership of automobiles to drop off a cliff.

That’s possible. But I think it very unlikely. I think we’ll see a dramatic increase in the number of single-car families, but it won’t be because they’re ordering autonomous taxis (although they may from time to time). It will be because they’re able to time-share a single vehicle without needing to physically be in the same place.

The argument for autonomous taxis and the abandonment of personal vehicle ownership hinges on the appealingly simplistic vision of “cars waiting in parking lots”. Since each of us only need our cars for a narrow slice of each day, it would make more sense to essentially share vehicle time with other people. The economic logic of this will mean that using autonomous taxis will be so much cheaper than owning a vehicle that people won’t do it.

What this analysis ignores, unfortunately, is that a significant majority of vehicles are used to commute to and from work. And the majority of those commutes happen at the same time for the vast majority of people. The fleet size required to support those commuting needs will be large enough that the businesses involved won’t see any substantial economy from the communal model, which means the costs won’t be significantly lowered compared to owning your own vehicle.

If you’re looking for what the tack-on effects of autonomous vehicles will be, my prediction is the second great suburban sprawl: When commuting means napping or watching TV or reading or working or otherwise being entertained/productive, the commuting times people will be willing to accept will increase significantly. That’ll push development further out from the city centers.

Pheasants are really stupid birds. They’ll go into a potato patch, dig up a potato, and start eating it. But if anything distracts them enough to make them look away from the potato, they’ll drop the potato. “Ugh!” they say. “Someone’s been eating this potato!” And they’ll move along to the next potato until… “Oh! Gross! Someone’s been eating this potato!”

You end up with a whole line of potatoes with one or two bites out of them.

In my personal little headcanon I like to imagine zombies do the same thing: “RAWWWGGHHH!! DELICIOUS FLESH!!!! MUAAARGHHH… Oh. Gross. This one’s dead. Let’s get another one.”

I saw Blade II in the theaters with a large group of people. One of my enduring memories from that film is from the drive home, when a member of the group insisted on criticizing the film because its vampires failed to honor the rules of Vampire: The Masquerade. I thought it was bizarre that someone felt that one piece of speculative fiction should be bound by the rules of another.

I mention this because I’ve noticed that fiction featuring time travel seems to bring this behavior out in people who would otherwise find it ridiculous to, say, hold Short Circuit to the Three Laws of Robotics (or whatever). It seems that a lot of people have very firm ideas about how time travel is “supposed” to work and they’re very unhappy whenever a film violates those “rules”.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This is something I’ve mentioned previously while talking about the handling of causality in Looper. That made sense to me because the Looper’s version of time travel was so unorthodox and unique. But I was really kind of taken aback when Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar prompted similar outrage for its use of a pretty bog-standard bootstrap paradox.

For those unfamiliar with bootstrap paradoxes, they involve any situation where an event appears to cause itself. This most often occurs with information. For example, you send a message back in time to yourself and then, when the time comes, you know what message you have to send because you already received it. But… who wrote the original message?

It hurts your brain because you’ve spent your entire life living a temporally linear life, but it’s widely used in time travel stories. (In fact, sometimes it can seem as if it’s almost impossible to find a time travel story that doesn’t feature a bootstrap paradox.)

RESOLVING THE BOOTSTRAP

How can the 5-dimensional creatures in Interstellar create a wormhole that’s required for their own existence?

There are a couple of ways to resolve (or, perhaps, understand) bootstrap paradoxes and maybe relieve your headache.

First, assume that the linearity of time is an illusion. Interstellar talks about this in the form of time being a “canyon” that the 5-dimensional beings can climb into and out of: All of time exists simultaneously. This radically changes the concept of causality (possibly eliminating it entirely.) In this scenario the question, “How can they create a wormhole if they need the wormhole to create wormhole?” is like asking, “How can you drop a rock into the canyon if the rock will land at the bottom?”

Second, and perhaps slightly easier to grok, is the “hidden iterations” theory of establishing stable timelines with time travel. Take the scenario in Terminator, for example. We can imagine a first iteration of events in which causality proceeded normally: Sarah Connor had sex with some random dude from the 20th century and gave birth to a son who later led a rebellion. Then SkyNet tries to use time travel to kill her son, so her son sends Kyle Reese back in time. This creates a second iteration in which Sarah Connor has sex with Kyle Reese and gives birth to a different son who also grows up to lead a rebellion. The timeline is now a stable loop and no longer changes (until James Cameron gets a really cool idea for a sequel).

Similarly, one can imagine an “original” version of history where humanity’s space program never found a wormhole and decided to do something like colonize Mars instead: Most of the human race dies off, but our civilization survives and eventually evolves into the 5-dimensional beings. And then the 5-dimensional beings look back and say, “It still sucks that billions of people died on the planet of our birth. I think we can fix it, though.” And then they send the wormhole back through time and rewrite the history of their own creation (but this time without the mass extinction event).

Third, in the specific case of Interstellar, you can assume that there is no bootstrap paradox: Cooper is simply wrong about the 5-dimensional aliens being a future version of humanity. (One of the really great things about the film, actually, is that it features a lot of people being wrong about a lot of things…. or maybe being right about them, but in ways that the film is not interested in proving one way or the other.)

“Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD” is an interesting extrapolation of where linguistic trends will take the language over the next 1,000 years. It’s a useful reminder that the English we speak is in a state of constant change.

One thing I will note, however, is that “Futurese” seems to be postulating a shift in English over the next 1,000 years that’s fairly equivalent to the shift in the language over the last 1,000 years. In doing so, I think it’s ignoring two vital factors:

First, the advent of print and widespread literacy had a significant effect in slowing vocabulary shifts.

Second, film and television seem to have had a massive arresting effect on pronunciation shifts.

William Shakespeare provides a valuable example of the former: His works are 400 years old and are definitely filled with archaisms. But the differences between modern English and Shakespeare pale in comparison to the differences between Shakespeare and the stuff written in 1200 AD. In fact, the vast majority of the shift away from Shakespeare’s English happened in the 100-150 years after his death: You can read commentators in the mid-18th century and the vast majority of the passages we have difficulty with in Shakespeare today are the same passages they were having difficulty with then. At the midpoint between us and Shakespeare is Jane Austen, whose English is essentially modern.

The baseline for the second point is obviously much shorter and might just represent a coincidental lull period in the evolution of pronunciation. But I don’t think so. I think the fact that we are regularly listening to words spoken 50 or 80 years ago is providing a consistent pressure that prevents (or at least radically slows) significant shifts in pronunciation which were common prior to the advent of sound recordings.