20 June

Lawrence is one of the world’s most famous theoretical physicists and science communicators. No ‘fanboy’. The technology is a revolution. The trip he mentions is over 8 hours of driving, urban and highways, more than 850 km. Tesla has gamified its use to speed adoption, by inventing ‘streaks’ that celebrate long times using self-driving without intervention (see the screen). It gets even smarter when they link it to their own in-house insurance, offered at a cheaper rate for those who use more self-driving (because they’re much lower risk, from the insurance point of view). This is the genius in the thinking, embedding everything inside everything else, so that gains in one area flow through to gains in all of the others. Tesla’s wider project is to ‘engineer’ all aspects of life in this way, so they mutually reinforce one another, through engineering. Societies that survive are centred on engineering. Building things. Building things is what creates social stability and unity. Humans interacting alone only produces rivalry and violence, and collapse.