[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. On yesterday's show, we talked briefly about Elon Musk being named Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, the founder of Tesla Motors, with its electric cars, recently involved with developing self-driving cars, and there's his private spaceflight company SpaceX. As we noted, Time chooses its person on the basis of the magnitude of their influence, not whether they judge the person as good or bad. Id in that context, the accompanying Time article said Musk's rise coincides with broader trends of which he and his fellow technology magnates are a part caus and part effect.

The continuing decline of traditional institutions in favor of individuals, government dysfunction that has delivered more power and responsibility to business, and chasms of wealth and opportunity, in an earlier era ambitions on the scale of interplanetary travel, were the ultimate collective undertaking around which presidents rallied nations. It also says they chose Musk, "For creating solutions to an existential crisis," they mean climate change, "For embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans, for driving society's most daring and disruptive transformations," from Time magazine.

Now, as it happens, journalist and opinion writer Alex Pareene had just published an article about Musk a few days earlier, called Losing a street fight to Elon Musk, a serious takedown of Musk for things like including a big touchscreen on which you can play video games while being the human and your self-driving car. Here is Musk talking about the on-road behind-the-vehicle video gaming future-- behind the wheel, I should say video gaming future that he envisions.

Elon Musk: If you think about a future where the car is often in autopilot or full self-driving mode, then entertainment is going to become increasingly important. You're going to want to watch movies, play games, use the internet, just little thing you things you want to do if you're not driving.

Brian Lehrer: With us now is Alex Pareene, not Elon Musk. We'll talk about his Elon Musk article and other recent things he's written, including on his substack newsletter called The AP, that's for Alex Pareene, not Associated Press, or recent New Republic articles he's written like Climate-Friendly Investment Funds are a Scam, Video Games are a Labor Disaster and, Centrist Pundits’ Supposedly Savvy, Terribly Wrong Takes About the New York Mayoral Race. Alex also hosts the New Republic podcast, The Politics of Everything. Alex, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Alex Pareene: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote about the touchscreen as a feature in the present. Musk talked about it in that clip as something for the future. What're they actually selling, and with what safety warnings?

Alex Pareene: That is really important to highlight the way he talks about it versus what they're currently selling. I wrote this thing about Musk after I read a couple New York Times pieces last week, one of which was about the fact that you can now play video games as the driver in a moving Tesla on a big touchscreen that's basically on the dash. It's part of a pattern of Musk essentially trying to sell the future before it's ready with his products.

The self-driving features on Tesla are not particularly more advanced than adaptive cruise control or the parallel parking assistance that other cars have, but they market them with the names autopilot and full self-driving. A lot of reporters, consumer reports has called him out for this. CNN's Michael Ballaban has a video in which he tests this so-called full self-driving in Brooklyn streets and it's not self-driving. Technically and officially it's I think level two in what the sort of autonomous driving engineers have classified autonomous car software as. [crosstalk] Level five with actual full self-driving. Two is basically driver-assist mode, but he's out there selling that, "You can turn this on," and allowing Tesla drivers to turn that on and beta tested in city streets.

Brian Lehrer: You cite one of the Times articles saying, most of Musk's competitors in the self-driving car market, wherever they are in that scale disallow certain actions on touchscreens while in motion and also have other self-driving safety features like infrared cameras which the National Transportation Safety Board recommended Tesla include, but it did not. How do you see Musk's place in the context of all that?

Alex Pareene: Well, I think what he's trying to do is what-- you have these other auto manufacturers much more established ones, ones that have been dealing with automobile safety regulations for decades. Musk has the attitude of a startup founder, and like other startup founders, I think what he's trying to do is come into the space, and basically the thing he's disrupting is regulation. I think in some sense, it's a dare that the government safety regulators won't stop him because his company is so valuable, and he's got many passionate fans.

He's less worried about getting in trouble for false marketing or getting in trouble for ignoring safety regulators when they suggest things like the infrared camera. The point of the infrared camera is that it checks that the driver is actually looking at the road, and the infrared's that it works at night. Some Tesla's have cameras, but they don't work very well in low light conditions, which is when you want a camera to work.

I think, in the same sense that, for example, Uber and WeWork came into spaces that were heavily regulated and just said, "We will ignore these regulations until you change them to suit us." I suspect we're seeing something similar with Elon Musk and his autonomous driving cars.

Brian Lehrer: You put that in your article in a really interesting history of the automobile, in general, automobile manufacturers seeing their power over everyone else that goes back more than a century, including the invention of the crime of jaywalking. Want to talk about that? That's probably the most people alive today haven't even ever thought about.

Alex Pareene: Yes, exactly. This historian, Peter Norton, has a terrific book about how the car took over city streets. It's called Fighting Traffic. In my newsletter about Musk, I linked to basically one chapter of that book which is about the invention of jaywalking. You wouldn't necessarily think that, that had to be invented but it did prior to the private automobile becoming the primary means by which people got around cities. The streets were shared and he sort of says that people contested the use of the streets. There were carriages, there were pushcarts, there were children playing, there were streetcars, all these things were contesting the use of the street.

The car upends, all of that by essentially being more dangerous, larger, faster, heavier than almost everything else, and more versatile. That led, in the beginning of the 20th century, to a lot of fights about the car's place on the city streets. When it became clear that pedestrians, in particular, were organized and ready to restrict the use of the car, in Cleveland, they actually had a referendum on speed governors so the car couldn't go above a certain speed and city limits.

That's when car manufacturers and auto enthusiast organizations got together, organized and through the media and through the police, basically, through newspapers, through government, through police they took this term jaywalking, and jay was a Midwestern sort of slang term for basically a country hick. They began to create this message that the people who would cross the street wherever they liked, which is what everyone in New York did at the time, and I think people would argue to some extent they still do, but the sort of person who would cross the street wherever they liked didn't know how city streets work. They were a rube, they didn't understand that the street was for the cosmopolitan new elite automobile.

Over the course of a few years and through lots of what they called education, they successfully redefined in the public eye what city streets were for. As he writes, then this happened in the context of, he estimates hundreds of thousands of pedestrian deaths in the 1920s at the hands of automobiles. Those deaths were treated as almost exclusively the fault of car drivers at the beginning of that decade, and by the end of that decade, by the end of the 1920s, it was more and more treated as a given that in a car crash where a pedestrian was hurt or killed, it was equally likely that the pedestrian was to blame.

That was actually a huge shift in how the media talked about these things, how the police treated these things. It took a lot of concerned effort. I compared it to that history because I think you could make a case that, if there are going to be accidents and deaths caused by these self-driving features being marketed as able to do things they are not able to do, and there have been deaths attributed to these self-driving features already, I think a lot of people might imagine, "Well then what will happen if these things start to hurt people? Is the government will come in and regulate them, or restrict them?" I think if you know that history of the automobile in cities, you could make a bet that the opposite in fact will happen. That what will happen instead is we will further restrict the streets in favor of this exciting new technology.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any Alex Pareene readers out there want to call in and talk to him? If you've been reading him on his Substack Newsletter, the AP, AP for Alex Pareene, not Associated Press, or his New Republic stuff, or just want to talk about what we've been discussing so far, if you've been hearing him for the first time. We'll get to a few of his other articles, which you can weigh in on as well.

Climate-Friendly Investment Funds are a Scam, Video Games are a Labor Disaster, and Centrist Pundits’ Supposedly Savvy, Terribly Wrong Takes About the New York Mayoral Race. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Here I think is a little pushback on your take on the Tesla. Andrew in Astoria you're on WNYC. Hi Andrew?

Andrew: Hey. Good morning Brian and guest. I'm just calling to push back a little bit on the idea of how the Tesla labels autopilot and their full self-driving beta. The autopilot Elon Musk describes as being an apt title for the feature, similar to how airplane pilots have the feature autopilot, where the car does a lot of the work is similar to the plane, but it requires active monitoring. In regards to their full self-driving beta, if you watch videos on YouTube, which is where you see a lot of this technology unfolding in the real world, I think full self-driving is an apt title because, if people have gone on trips where they'll be driving miles and miles without out interventions going from being on the highway to the city streets, back onto the highway, it's a very new technology, it's still in beta phase. I think the latest version is 10.7 gets incrementally updated and the people that can use--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, you can finish your thought, Andrew. Go ahead, sorry.

Andrew: I was going to finish up by saying that, this isn't available to everyone. The people that can use this beta version have been screened by this proprietary software that they have that determines the safety of the driver, and this same software that's determining the safety of the driver to be able to use this beta is also the same software that's being rolled out in Texas, and I believe one other state under the name Tesla Insurance. This software determines the safety of the driver using a ton of proprietary parameters.

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] information about that. Now, let me jump in just for time and get your response from Alex. Alex, you heard all that.

Alex Pareene: It's a beta test. I didn't opt-in to be part of this beta test. I didn't. These things are on our streets right now. I was on my way home from dropping my kid off at school today and I see a woman in a Tesla with her hands, not on the wheel. That happened this morning. I've seen the videos of these things driving into traffic. We've all seen those videos as well. The safety screening, that's black box technology. I don't know if I can trust it when I have also seen the videos of these cars behaving incredibly dangerously.

The idea of a beta test in California, for example, legislators are asking the California DMV, "How are these Teslas allowed to be doing these beta tests on city streets when other autonomous vehicle companies have these much more rigorous testing systems in which there have to be two people in the car that are monitoring it at all times?" Again, it's an experiment that is being carried out on the rest of us without our approval. That would be my response.

Brian Lehrer: You want to have one more, go Andrew?

Andrew: May I say one thing?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Andrew: If you look at the actual data in regards to the amount of miles driven on this software versus accidents, it's extremely small. Now, granted any accident that results in a loss of life is a terrible tragedy.

Brian Lehrer: Let me throw in this stat that Alex cited from the New York Times article. 12 traffic deaths in the last five years in Tesla cars operating in autopilot mode. Andrew, go ahead.

Andrew: Sure. A lot of those investigations that initially come out sensationalized as being the fault of the software have then determined that the fault lay in the driver in that they operated it in some way that it wasn't supposed to be operated. Then in regards to what [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Like while playing a video maybe?

Andrew: I don't believe that there's a specific example of somebody playing a video game and then getting crashed. It's possible. I have more to say about the video games, but I think fundamentally what Tesla's trying to do is create an environment where the most safe outcome on the road is established. I wouldn't say that the most safe outcome is humans driving cars. The amount of accidents per year of humans driving cars is astronomical. I wouldn't say-- It's not a very straight logical conclusion.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and it's counterintuitive. It's a little counterintuitive. Andrew, I'm going to leave it there, I really appreciate your call. Call us again. Just to button up this topic, Alex, I know I heard projections when these first started coming out whatever level of self-driving or autopilot cars, that statistically, a world with all self-driving cars would have fewer crashes than the world of human operators and it's counterintuitive and it doesn't feel right.

I've never driven one, so I don't know what it feels like to actually sit behind the wheel, but not actually do anything. My impulse is that I would feel incredibly out of control and at-risk, but maybe that's counterintuitive and just wrong. How much is it still a brain-scrambling possibility about the limits of human judgment and behavior versus that of Artificial Intelligence that's driving your car?

Alex Pareene: I think in a world where every car on the road is a actually well-designed AI-driven car, I think you would see fewer accidents. It's the transition-- I want to be clear here. I've never driven a Tesla. I've used a more advanced, basically adaptive cruise control on the highway, and works very well on the highway. That's the use case for this thing, to stay in your lane on a well-maintained road, a well-maintained grade-separated road where you're not going to see a kid chasing his ball into the street or something like that.

In that universe, I think this software has a place and will be superior to human drivers. I don't think it's anywhere near ready and will not be ready anytime soon to face the uses of a street in a city where the car has to share space with everyone else. I fear the future is or what the future that they want is, in the name of safety, in the name of saying, "Well, we have to separate these cars from everyone else," that the rest of us will be restricted in our use of the roads.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Since we're talking about video games on the dashboards of self-driving vehicles, you also wrote an article, Video Games are a Labor Disaster. How so?

Alex Pareene: Oh, boy. There's been a lot of news in that front lately. It's a really interesting industry. The video game industry is one in which almost no one is unionized, although there are a lot of people trying to change that now. It's a high-status world, so people are really excited to work in it, which allows for a lot of exploitation of the people who make games. This was actually, in part a review of a book by Jason Schreyer about all these video game companies that closed. It's an interesting job because the way that the game development works for AAA games, the biggest blockbusters in video games is you hire a ton of people, you overwork them immensely, and then when the game is done, usually you lay a bunch of them off or even the studio shuts down.

In my piece for the New Republic, I compared the video game industry to the film industry which is also ad hoc creative work done by a lot of people to create a single cultural product. There's a huge difference between the two industries, although there's been labor unrest in film recently too. The huge difference is that, the film worker be it the writer, be it the below-the-line technical talent belongs to a union that has an agreement with the Producers Association and because of that, when their film is done, they don't need to worry about losing their health care. They have a pension and they know when they find their next job, they don't need to negotiate the conditions of that next job. All of their jobs, the working conditions have already been negotiated and they're already covered by the contract.

My suggestion was, video games would be a fairer place to work if they could have something more like that but because the video game industry didn't come into existence until long after the film industry, it didn't develop that same trade union culture. That has allowed for video game workers to be much more exploited by the publishers and the people who make a fortune off these games.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Another of your articles, give us the lightning round version if you can, Climate-Friendly Investment Funds are a Scam. What do you think?

Alex Pareene: This one's hard to do the lightning round version but they're investing right now. There's a hot trend for basically investing in things that are supposed to be environmentally good, socially good, and governmentally good. It's this whole trend and my argument was that the way these investments are graded is nonsensical in the sense that you could have, an oil company with a diverse board might be rated higher according to how these agencies rate these firms. Agencies rate firms based on their standards of how socially good they are.

To use this hypothetical example, Exxon could have a more diverse board than Pfizer, and now Exxon suddenly is more good by these standards than Pfizer. The piece was arguing a little bit more than that narrow point, but that was just one example of how I think there's a lot of greenwashing going on in the sector that is supposed to encourage investment in green technology.

Brian Lehrer: One more thing, and you don't have to be two lightning roundy about this because it's a big complex topic that we're probably going to talk about a zillion times over the next year, and that is Democratic versus Republican politics, and how either party might wind up winning the '22 midterms in terms of control of Congress. You had your article just recently called The Mess Age and in the local New York context, the one I cited, Centrist Pundits’ Supposedly Savvy, Terribly Wrong Takes About the New York Mayoral Race. Why don't you start there because there is certainly conventional wisdom now that Eric Adams won the Democratic primary precisely because he wasn't the most progressive candidate in the race, especially on crime?

Alex Pareene: I think my number one point on that is, I don't understand how you can extrapolate from New York politics out almost anywhere else. Maybe a couple other big cities. New York politics are really not comparable to national politics in a lot of really important ways. My thing with Adam specifically was, if you had people who would usually cover national politics, and usually ignore New York politics parachuting in to try to take the example of Eric Adams and use it to make an argument about races nationally, races everywhere else, I think that it doesn't make a lot of sense because Adams, in a lot of important ways, is a specific New York figure and he had a constituency already.

To try to flatten it into the moderate beat, the police reformers, ignores even the fact that his own history, as a former police officer, included him being a longtime critic of the NYPD. There were all these contradictory things in his background that I think don't allow you to neatly transpose this context onto other electoral contexts.

Brian Lehrer: The national version of that is your recent pushback against Matthew Iglesias and others who are saying the Democrats if they want a prayer in a midterm election year of holding on to Congress next year, should focus on bedroom, living room, kitchen, pocketbook issues. You don't think so?

Alex Pareene: Well, I don't know. I don't typically claim that I know how to win elections. I try not to. Maybe I did before. I try not to anymore, but because I try not to claim that I know how to win elections, I'm very suspicious that people do. One of my arguments in that piece was there are people making this case that Democrats got too progressive on a lot of issues, and they started losing a lot of support, and that they started focusing too much on cultural issues as opposed to pocketbook issues.

My response to that is if you look at what actual living Democrats do when they're running for election or running for re-election, is they're already doing all the things these people want. Watch the ads. They run on health care, they run on drug prices, they run on kitchen table stuff, constantly. If cultural issues are hurting them and becoming more salient, there has to be something causing that that is not what Democrats choose to talk about. I am making the case that focusing on what Democratic politicians campaign on exposes the limits of how democratic messages even reach voters, especially now.

Brian Lehrer: Meaning they are not talking about race.

Alex Pareene: I think a lot of Democrats would love to run away from talking about race. Again, let's get into this idea of, "Well, what does Eric Adams mean for national politics?" It all depends on context. In the New York City context, it does not make sense to run away from race. Race is a highly salient issue here and you can be progressive on it and win. Then we get to the case of, "Well, what does that mean nationally?" The subtext of a lot of these arguments about messaging is that Democrats have lost white voters without college education because they got too supportive of immigration, and they got too critical of police, and embraced Black Lives Matters basically.

What I say is that even if there's truth to that argument, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't reverse that. This is those kinds of voters, beginning in the Obama administration, now associate the Democrats with progressive policies and on race. They associate them with that and you can't reverse that. I'm just saying you got to find a way to win within that context.

Brian Lehrer: Alex Pareene writes the Substack Newsletter, the AP Newsletter, AP his initials for Alex Pareene. He's also a co-host of The New Republic's podcast, The Politics of Everything. Alex, thank you so much.

Alex Pareene: Brian, it was a pleasure.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.