Book Review: <i>Autonorama – The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving</i> by Peter Norton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With transportation deeply implicated in the human environmental footprint, urban mobility arrangements have emerged as the focus of much scholarly interest.In this light, the continuing dependence on the personal automobile has been a key conundrum egging on much of this curiosity.American historians (of different convictions) have been notably at the forefront of a critical examination of the deep entrenching of the automobile in USA.The overwhelming dependence on the automobile in USA, according to its many interlocutors, is visible in how cities were reshaped in playing host to the automobile 1 ; is a facet of widespread environmental terra-forming 2 ; is entangled within deep cultural strains 3 ; is an outcome of strategies by automotive interests to re-shape streets. 4While the particular instances of how automobile dependence in America was wrought is novel, the storyline in each of these above examples is familiarthe mobility constellation surrounding the automobile has instantiated a vast and formidable engine of transformation through which dependence on the automobile became embroiled in multiple social, cultural, and environmental layers.Peter Norton in his latest offering marks a refreshing break from this well-trod originary narrative of American automobility and adopts conceptual and methodological directions to articulate a novel argumenthow is automobile dependence sustained in America over time and what are the conceptual threads that allow us to grasp the perpetuation of this dependence.For Norton, the story of continuing automobile dependence is inseparable from its periodic renewal effected by the seemingly infallible promise that technological advances offer to engineer congestion-free and safe urban travel.A key conceptual device that embeds this promise of technology is the technofuturistic vision.Spanning a period of about 80 years from the circa 1940 to 2015, Norton distinguishes four episodes (each separated by 25 years) when technofuturistic visions were evoked, modelled, demonstrated, and deployed to maintain the dominance of the automobile.Each of these visions reified as dioramas at major public exhibitions employed spectacle to convince consumers that technological advances of the time would usher in a desirable future of urban mobility.Referred to as futuramas, they "depict utopian futures of about twenty years hence: soon enough to be relevant to consumers, but sufficiently distant to avert distrust and disillusionment when reality disappointedas it always did" (p.37).The four futuramas depicted 1 Clay McShane,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".