I rented a car in Italy. It has every safety system the brochure could fit on the page. Lane keep assist, forward collision avoidance, all of it.
I'm on the motorway. There are workers in the middle of the road, actual people standing in the live lane behind some cones. So I do the obvious thing: I move over to the edge of my lane, putting as much space as I can between two tonnes of metal and the men standing on the tarmac.
The car will not let me. Lane keep assist decides I'm drifting and gently, firmly steers me back towards the centre. Towards the people. I'm fighting the wheel to stay away from a human being, and the car is fighting me to put him back in front of the bumper.
Then, for an encore, the forward collision system slams the brakes on for no reason I could see. No car ahead, no obstacle, nothing. Just a sudden, violent stop on a fast road with traffic behind me, because some sensor had a bad day.
The Machine Knows Better Than You
Here's the thing. In that moment I was right and the car was wrong. I could see the men. I could see the geometry. I had made a correct, deliberate decision to keep us all alive, and the car overruled it, because the car is built on the assumption that whatever I'm doing must be a mistake.
That's the design philosophy. Not "this driver has judgment, assist him." It's "this driver is the statistical average idiot, correct him." On average, sure, maybe that saves some lives. But I'm not the average. In that specific situation I was the one with eyes and context, the car was the one being dumb, and it had the final say.
It's Not the Car
I'm not really here to complain about one rental car.
The car is just the clearest little example of a thing that's happening everywhere. Every system you touch now assumes you cannot be trusted with the unpadded version.
Cross the road where there's no crossing. Beep. Jaywalking.
Buy the thing you can afford with your own money. Are you sure? Here's a cooling-off period and seven warnings.
Open a bottle of pills. Good luck, the cap is engineered to defeat you and most people over seventy.
Everything has a guard rail, an "are you sure?", a default that overrides you, a corner rounded off so you can't hurt yourself on it. Each one, on its own, sounds reasonable. Together they add up to a world where the baseline assumption is that you're a hazard to yourself and need managing.
No One Is a Trusted Adult
That's the actual loss. Somewhere along the way we stopped having trusted adults.
A trusted adult is someone the system assumes is competent until proven otherwise. Someone allowed to make the call, take the risk, swerve away from the workers, own the outcome. We used to default to that and only pull a person's privileges once they showed they couldn't handle it.
Now it's flipped. Everyone is treated as not-yet-proven-safe, forever, by default. The car, the app, the form, the warning label: none of them think you're an adult. They think you're a large child who happens to have a licence, and they're going to hold the wheel for you whether you like it or not.
You Get What You Train
The problem with treating everyone like they can't be trusted is that, eventually, they can't.
Judgment is a muscle. If nothing you do has consequences, if every edge is padded and every decision second-guessed by a machine, you stop developing the thing that let you make good calls in the first place. You end up with adults who genuinely cannot cross a road without a green man, because they were never once trusted to just look.
So the safety features make the average person a little safer and a lot more helpless. The corners come off the world. And then one day you're on a motorway in Italy, you finally need to make a real decision with real stakes, you make the right one, and the padded cell physically fights you for the privilege of getting it wrong.
I'd like to be allowed to be an adult. Stop holding the wheel.
