The Death of Autonomy

I have an embarrassing story to tell. 

A few weeks ago, as I was leaving work in Sacramento I did what I always do: checked the traffic on Google Maps. Only this time, shockingly, Google told me that I-80 westbound from Sacramento towards San Francisco was completely shut down. What the hell? In order to pick up my kids from school, I would have to take I-5 north and divert up and around all of the suburbs and farmland west of Sacramento, which would end up doubling my drive time from half an hour to an hour. And it wasn’t just me having to divert - Google was warning all the people trying to get to any part of the Bay Area that they needed to divert, too. Everyone going to San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, the Silicon Valley was getting the same message. The main artery to get people from east to west across Northern California was shut down, and we were all screwed.

As I crawled through traffic I called my husband and asked him to find out why 80 was closed. I was assuming there must be some huge accident blocking all lanes of traffic. There had been no advance notice of a planned closure for construction, and there were no electronic billboards warning drivers that the road ahead was shut. My husband checked the CHP and CalTrans incident report pages and found…nothing. Nothing on the news sites. Nothing on social media. So he kept digging, until he got in touch with the woman who runs the statewide board at CalTrans that notifies drivers of road closures across California. She had no idea why he was asking her about 80 being closed. She told him 80 was wide open. Every lane. In both directions. He told her to try Googling a route from Sacramento to San Francisco on her phone. She did, and was equal parts astounded and pissed off.

In the meantime, all the other lemmings and I spent an hour and fifteen minutes to go 39 miles around the faux road closure, when we could have spent a glorious 20 minutes to go 21 miles across the decidedly open and decidedly empty freeway. Why? Because we are held in the complete thrall of this technology, and have lost our autonomy.

There is a deep sense of irony here. Allow me a moment to explain. We were promised that as we allowed technology to automate our lives, things would become simpler. Automatic deposit: your paycheck goes straight into your bank account. Automated teller machines: access to that money 24/7. Automated billpay: your paycheck flows right back out of your account to pay your bills. The word automate is the verb form of the concept of automation, a noun. The term automation was coined in 1948 by Delmar S. Harder, a VP at Ford Motors. I bet you can already see the connection here - you probably know who invented the conveyer belt, and why they were waiting for someone to come up with a term like automation. Well, Mr. Harder came to the rescue by fabricating a word as he might a 1948 Ford Super DeLuxe. Though not a linguist, he decided to play one by removing the suffix -ic from automatic (-ic is what makes automatic an adjective), and replacing it with -ion to make himself a noun, automation. Voilà, a custom built word, courtesy of Ford Motors! 

If we pull the word automation apart, as an English teacher such as myself is wont to do, it’s kind of fascinating: the word comes from the Greek automatos, which, as applied to a non-living thing, means “self-moving” or “self-acting” and was used in the ancient Greek to describe the gates of Olympus as well as the tripods of Hephaestus - things that should not have been vital and yet seemed to have life. Break automatos down and you get autos which means “self” and matos which means “thinking, animated.” So…taken together, automation means self thinking, self animated.

In today’s world, at the behest of all of these self-thinking, self-animated machines - these devices providing automation - we seem to have lost our autonomy. According to Kant, one can achieve autonomy by listening with discernment to their conscience and then establishing a doctrine of the Will which provides oneself with their own form of laws. Indeed, the word autonomy is from the Greek autonomia, meaning “independence”, with the root autos (meaning “self”, and common to automation) combined with nomos, meaning “custom, law.” Our problem is that the discernment mentioned by Kant has been thrown out the window by today’s society. Rather than utilizing our autonomy - our literal self law - we have succumbed entirely to a life of automation - a life ruled by self thinking, self animated machines. We have completely lost the value in autos: self.

Just look at further stories of what happens when people allow their autonomy to be completely subsumed by automation. In November of 2024, search and rescue teams in Oregon had to rescue dozens of motorists after they used GPS and attempted to follow an impassable, snowy, rural mountain road to avoid a traffic delay on I-84. This follows on the heels of a driver in Austria who followed his GPS directions and drove his $145,000 BMW up a hiking trail…and continued driving despite the trail narrowing and hikers telling him to back up…until eventually the driver reached a point at which his car was completely wedged between the side of a mountain and a safety railing. The fire department had to be brought in to remove the car and in the meantime hikers on both sides of the trail were blocked. And let’s not forget November of 2023, when an error in Google Maps led hundreds of drivers leaving Las Vegas to believe that they could save nearly an hour off their drive time if they took an alternate route that turned out to be a dirt path in the Mojave Desert that went nowhere. At least when Google Maps screwed with me, my alternate route was an actual freeway.

In the age of AI, we’re sacrificing our autonomy at the altar of automation: you write my emails for me, electronic assistant. You make my presentation slides. You plan my itinerary. You choose the restaurant. The world today, and the technology conglomerates that oversee it, are encouraging us to automate as much of our lives as possible. Let the self-thinking, self-animated machines take over.

That’s what the word automation means, remember?

We mustn’t lose sight of our self-law; our autonomy. Kant would encourage us to exercise our discernment in considering the laws that underpin the Will with which we move through society. Perhaps we can start by simply exercising some discernment when looking at an online map; by just remembering that Google Maps is not the boss of us. I can be a law unto myself, one who says: that route is ridiculous! I’m not going that way! 

Now that I’ve reminded you that the prefix auto means “self”, think about the etymology of the word automobile. And think of the irony in the fact that we’ve lost our autonomy while driving these automobiles. 

Don’t you think we’re doing something wrong here?