Today’s column (gift link), like much of my work, is about perceptions, reactions and implications of change in a specific place.
In our modern media environment, we often feel that everything is happening everywhere all at once. This is literally true, of course, and always has been. But our human perception isn’t really able to process everything. Until the last few decades, humans were blissfully unaware of most things. That is, unless we were educated or connected somehow, and even then the list of things we encountered was curated. There are good and bad things about this, but it was the way of the world for a long, long time.
Now the fire hose is on all the time. The curators of our feeds are almost entirely commercial or political, certainly sensationalistic. If you hadn’t noticed, it’s driving us insane.
In the midst of this phenomenon, I’ve noticed that hot button conversations repeat themselves. As new people experience things for the first time, their first reactions clash with other people’s second or third reactions. But because everyone is getting the fire hose, there are always more uninformed first reactions than informed debate over process and policy.
For an example of what I mean, read the comments on any story about a small town’s first traffic roundabout.
This is a long set-up to the idea of autonomous vehicles. When the autonomous ride share service Waymo announced its entry into the Minneapolis market recently, people in Minnesota had their first reactions to the idea of sharing the road with driverless cars.
All manner of fear emanated from these reactions, as one would expect. It sounds kinda nuts. But this overlooked the fact that autonomous transit vehicles have been in use elsewhere for a while. Not only that, but they’ve been active in a small northern Minnesota town near my Itasca County home for the past three years. Instead of gut reactions, we can learn from the existing record.
Perhaps this is useful advice for a complex and often confusing modern world.
Read “Self-driving cars in Minneapolis? A small Minnesota town did it first” in the Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.
