By Steven Goldsmith at Brownstone dot org.

Recently, I rented a 2026 Toyota RAV4 hybrid. A more spacious car than I needed but perfect for those who fantasize helming a yacht from a captain's chair along intercostal waterways; and for those who require the instrumentation of their dashboards to be only slightly more complex than consoles in 747 cockpits.

As for me, I prefer my 2004 Toyota Corolla, termed by its regular mechanic as "the tank" because of its durability and seeming indestructibility. Besides a burned-out clutch it has never needed major repairs. (In their design of that model, Toyota forgot the memo about planned obsolescence.) I require from my Corolla only that it goes where I point it and stops on command. The rest I can figure out.

So imagine my alarm after I slid into the rental and started the engine. The large dashboard screen above the radio lit up and announced Toyota Audio Multimedia Services with functions for Roadside Assistance, Destination Assist, Cloud Navigation, Intelligent Assist, Driver Support, Proactive Driving Assist, Lane Change Assist, Traffic Jam Assist, and Dynamic Radar Cruise Control.

As I shifted into Reverse to back out of my spot, a pinging startled me. The screen flashed to an aerial view of my car's position in a space bounded by colored lines (a "Driver Assist" feature that I appreciated as otherwise I wouldn't have known where my car was or that I was actually in it). "CHECK SURROUNDINGS FOR SAFETY" the screen commanded.

Pondering that novel idea I exited the lot onto a country road. I drove maybe two hundred feet before a fresh set of images on the screen drew my glance. With my touch of ADHD I couldn't resist. Instantly, a message flashed on the dashboard directly in front of me: "DRIVER INATTENTION DETECTED. LOOK FORWARD." I spewed a few bad words at my omniscient nanny. (Fortunately, my cell phone was off so Siri couldn't hear me. Or maybe she could and was too embarrassed to comment. Who knows these days?)

To compound the insult, when I approached an intersection the electronic nursemaid finger-wagged, "CAUTION: CROSSING TRAFFIC DETECTED." And I don't know how I could have arrived at my destination in one piece if it hadn't continued to flash for the duration of my journey the official speed limit for my route even though road signs were perfectly visible. Not to mention, thank God, that it alerted me throughout with a luminescent "D" that the gearshift was in Drive as opposed to Reverse, Neutral, or Park, the only four gears available. Once, when I parked briefly to study a street map, "VEHICLE WILL TURN OFF IF PARKED FOR 1 HOUR. PERFORM AUTO OFF?" followed with a YES and a NO button in case I couldn't recognize a question when I saw one or was unaware of the binary choices for my reply.

You may laugh at this idiocy. I did at first. Then I reflected upon its implications. Starting in 2027, by federal law all new cars in the US must contain such functions plus a kill switch that stops the car if the driver shows signs of impairment like sudden swerving or the appearance of fatigue, intoxication, or inattention. Accordingly, my RAV4 rental represented a vanguard of the new smart cars designed to do one thing, and one thing only. It is not to make us safer. How does a chip that stops your car in the middle of a highway do that? A dashboard screen that distracts the driver with enough bling to make a neon-lit Times Square billboard blush—how does that make us safer? Safety is not the agenda; it rarely is anymore. No, the purpose is to seduce us into surrendering our agency, our autonomy.

This anecdote coalesces with other contemporary phenomena that prompt us to jettison self-governance because of convenience, time savings, submission to authority, laziness, and/or fear: reliance on electronics to tell us where to go (GPS), what to think (AI, Siri, Alexa), how to count (calculators), how we function (wearables). We need only to lift a finger—literally—to have our smartphone...