Thoreau on Self-Driving Cars
To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all at length will ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”
I often wonder what he would have thought of the Internet. Walden is basically a Xanga in paperback.