There’s a line almost everyone knows. Henry Ford supposedly said that if he asked customers what they wanted before the automobile, they would have replied, a faster horse.
There is no good evidence that Ford ever said it. The Henry Ford Museum tried to authenticate the quote and cannot trace it to him. But it has become associated with Ford decades after his death.
The line survives because the underlying idea feels true.
People are usually much better at explaining the outcome they want than imagining an entirely different system for producing it. A traveler in the 19th century could tell you that a journey was comparatively too slow, uncomfortable or expensive. It would have been much harder for them to imagine the cars, the gas stations, the established road network and the enormous reordering of cities that followed.
This is a fairly natural way of thinking; it’s not stupid. We often use what already exists as the reference point for what comes next. People disproportionately prefer an existing state of affairs when it is presented as the default. Omission bias has shown that harms caused by action can be judged more harshly than harms caused by inaction.
When considering technology, it matters because the risks of something new tend to be visible, while the costs of preventing it are often invisible.
If a new type of aircraft is approved and crashes, there is an accident, an investigation, and a person who approved the rules. If a technology is delayed for 20 years, there is rarely an equivalent event. There is no TikTok or short of the journey that never happened, the business that was never created, the medicine that took an hour rather than ten minutes to arrive, or the thousands of hours people continued to spend sitting in traffic, looking in the rear-view mirror.
Existing systems acquire an advantage; their failures become familiar.
A car accident is tragic, but it belongs to a category society already understands. An accident involving a new type of autonomous aircraft will initially feel different, even if evidence eventually shows the new system to be safer. We compare unfamiliar risks not with a world without risk, but with risks we have become accustomed to.
This is where safety becomes a complicated mistress. Safety is essential, but it can obscure a broader question: safe compared with what?
The Traffic Light
The first widely recognized electric traffic signal in the US was deployed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914. The first three-color signal we all know and love followed in Detroit in 1920. They appeared because streets had become a wonderfully chaotic mixture of pedestrians, horses, bicycles, streetcars, and a rapidly growing number of automobiles. A better coordination system, it appeared, was needed.
The traffic light, a restriction on freedom, was not arbitrary; it helped make mass car traffic possible. Two people want to occupy the same piece of ground. The system resolves that conflict by dividing access through time. One person receives permission to move while another must wait. The restriction creates order, and that order creates additional capacity.
