"If you've had any experience at all with computers, would you really want one driving your car??"

That's a question posed by Annie Gottlieb over on Facebook as she linked to this article about self-driving Tesla involved in a fatal accident. My answer is, "Yes, when you're talking about the right computer."

My experience with PCs has been horrible: They'r unreliable, prone to crashing and early deaths. 

But my experience with Apple products has been amazing. So, if Microsoft were to produce a self-driving car, I would be wary. But if Apple perfects their self-driving car for the market, I would immediately put it on my wish list. 

I love to ride in cars, but I don't care much for driving. Even before there were computers, I remember as a kid fantasizing about having a car that I could enter and simply tell it where to take me. On the trip, I could read and write and think and pray and play music at an incredible volume. 

So, yep I want a self-driving car!

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

[UPDATE: Writer and editor Annie Gottlieb and I have continued our little dialog on self-driving cars over on Facebook. She responded to what I posted above:

Mark Daniels -- what you are describing already exists in large part. It's called a "train" ... ;))

Smart aleck! :)

She goes on:

I love to drive -- maybe because for a female it was so empowering when little else was (sign o' the times: I dated a couple of guys who wouldn't let me drive their cars), or maybe it's just genetic -- my father and his mother loved to drive (though she had no sense of direction and once left Chicago for New York, only to be surprised when she arrived at the Mississippi River). I also once had the (empowering) experience of minimizing an accident with my driving reflexes. So driving is how I like to be in a car ... though it is also a strain, which us why I also like ... the train.

Annie makes some good points. I responded:

In some places, trains can take you where you need to go--such as if you're a commuter in places like New York, Philly, San Francisco, or Chicago. If I lived in places like that, I'd take the train.

But the train won't work for most of my transportation needs. And even when a train will do (or a plane or a ship), i still need something like a car to get me to the station, airport, or dock.

Now about how you like to "be" in a car: Whenever we travel together by car, my wife drives. She's a self-confessed control freak. Some years ago, a friend loaned us the use of a new house she'd built on a mountain outside of Durango, Colorado. We decided to drive in order to see parts of the country we really hadn't seen before. We took our kids and my mother-in-law. Five licensed drivers in the car...and my wife drove every mile there and back. While we razzed her about that, I didn't mind--I'd describe myself as a confident, if unenthusiastic, driver.

But, here's the thing. In addition to being a control freak, my wife also claims to get carsick if she has to be a rider for long. She HAS to drive, she claims. It seems like a rationalization to me. But this is one manifestation of her control issues I don't mind. It's led to some good trips.

Because my kids were prone to carsickness too--and I never have been--it led to one of the best, most enduring traditions of our longer car rides: I read to my family...now just my wife.

When we took the kids to Disneyworld over twenty years ago, I read all seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia on the way to and from Florida. The practice continues. Right now, on our weekly forays to see our parents I'm reading Jon Meacham's new bio of George H.W. Bush. Yes, there are audio books, but I prefer reading to listening...and maybe that's my way of being a control freak. And I seriously doubt that fellow passengers of the Amtrak would much like hearing me read out loud during their trips.

With all of that said, I think that Brit motor racing enthusiast and one time pub owner--a man with a great name--Mark Daniels, plays the trump card on whether we should worry about riding in a computer-driven car in his comment to this post. He says this to the wary:

And yet most people get on board a plane without realising that it's a computer that's in charge of pretty much the whole flight...

True.]

Gottlieb, Althouse, and Blogging

Over on Facebook, Annie Gottlieb recently became sentimental about the old days of blogging...all the way back in 2004:

Today I found myself nostalgic for the early days of blogging as if it was some leisurely, pastoral 19th-century...
Posted by Annie Gottlieb on Thursday, January 7, 2016

I was in the thick of blogging back then as well and remember it as a heady time when we thought that ordinary people--though Gottlieb is no ordinary person, she's a published author--could get our thoughts out into public view and engage in public dialog about issues that we thought were important or just engage in silliness that "the blogosphere" might find interesting.

And, as Gottlieb points out, in the days before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and even the now nearly-forgotten MySpace, there were thousands of people writing blogs, commenting on blogs, and interacting with blogs in an interesting way. A recovering alcoholic told me that a piece I'd written had caused him to go to worship at a church for the first time in his life. An expert on German culture told me how insightfully I'd written on German ambivalence about a national ad campaign that encouraged patriotic pride. A political journalist complimented a piece I'd written on the 2008 presidential campaign. The New York Times linked to a piece I wrote on the gnostic gospel of James. In the process, I virtually "met" a lot of interesting people. Gottlieb, for one. But others as well. As I say, heady stuff.

As Gottlieb posted on Facebook, that was all short-lived. Social media came along and many of us in the blogosphere drifted to it. But few of the posts that appear on social media today--including cat videos--are as interesting as the thoughtful, interesting, passionate, or funny blogging being done in those days by people like Mark D. Roberts, Richard L. Cohen, Danny Miller, Charlie LeHardy, Alex M. Jordan, Tamar Jacobson, John Schroeder, and others.

Several bloggers have weathered the changes wrought by social media and the usurpation of the blogosphere by name brands. One who stands out to me, though I don't always agree with what she says, is Ann Althouse, law professor at the University of Wisconsin, who, by the way, met her husband through her blog, a guy who, when their face-to-face "courting" began, lived about five miles from where we were living in Clermont County, Ohio. In a comment on Gottlieb's Facebook post, I wrote:

...Ann Althouse seemed to "get" blogging from the beginning. She's...a quick study with a wonderful wit. She writes well. And she's thick-skinned. I still read her blog occasionally and clearly, she has a loyal readership.

When I say that Althouse "got" blogging (and did so in ways that others, including me, didn't), I mean that she seemed to see it as a kind of performance art, the perfect venue for her rapid and often unique observations of reality, the news, and politics. (Though her politics don't easily fall into red or blue categories.) She understood that the blogger could entertain and provoke, but with humor. The blog became an outlet for the kinds of observations two friends might make to each other about the latest headline, a piece of art, a place in a park or a coffee shop, or, and this is something that horrifies Althouse, a man wearing short pants.Althouse's blog is still enormously popular, her many daily posts eliciting lots of comments and dialog. Often, Althouse's posts are cultural or semiotic observations.

Gottlieb responded to my observation:

...you're right, Ann figured it out and is one of the survivors. (I met most if not all of my blogfriends in her comments section—you included, I think!)

Yes, me included. And interesting people like Gottlieb are part of why I still blog. I still hope to keep finding them and to interact and dialog with them in respectful, and more long-form, ways about the most important ideas and values in our lives.

"Hurricane Irene and the Death of 'Here'"

That's the title of this interesting slice of life from the Hurricane Irene experience by Annie Gottlieb.