NASCAR: Has Our Love Affair With the Car Ended?

It is an axiom that Americans love cars. And here in North Carolina, we can think of NASCAR as one manifestation that of love. But in recent years NASCAR has been falling in popularity as a sport. This piece by Frank Deford, suggests NASCAR is declining because we don't love cars as much as previous generations do. It is not possible to tinker around with cars in the same way that our fathers might have. We have other things to occupy our time with and spend our dollars on. He also suggests for many people, driving is not fun, it is just a necessary evil to get from point A to point B, and we try to make it less painful by filling it with distractions, such as talking on our cell phone. In the days of the Model T, everyone was expected to be able to fix their car, but now cars have gotten very complicated and also very reliable. It is a common theme in the history of technology that as a technology develops, it gets simpler to use, but maybe the current ease of use of the car means that we don't love it as much.

Machines that Replace Human Skill, Chapter CCXXX

As David Landes has said, one of the key aspects of the Industrial Revolution is that machines replace human skill. This has been one of the key technological trends over the last two hundred years. A recent chapter in it is surgical robots. We think of surgery as one of the critical areas today where we rely on a person's manual dexterity. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a surgical robot, called the Raven. It uses open source software (so people can devise their own routines for it) and it relatively cheap. Would people feel comfortable having a technician oversee their surgery that was actually performed by a robot?