As a thought experiment, pretend for a moment that cars are alive.

In science fiction there is a technique called ‘extrapolation’ which can be easily described as ‘if this goes on.’ Take an idea, say rockets, and extrapolate into the future. One thing you might get is Star Trek. A future in which rockets have evolved into interstellar space ships and we go from planet to planet like nineteenth century sailing ships.

The sf writer Robert Heinlein said that there were three orders of extrapolation in story telling. Take the idea of the invention of a the car. In the first order, the simplest, the hero is in love, his girl gets kidnapped by the bad guy and he invents and builds a car, leaps into it, chases them down and saves her.

In the second order of extrapolation, the hero invents the car, and the writer invents highways and thinks of the world needed to support cars.

In the third order, and this is the hard one, the writer invents cars and highways, but he also invents drive in movies, and a world in which the line of shops in a town disappear and are replaced by the shopping mall surrounded by its vast expanse of parking lot, a parking lot far larger than the mall itself. And maybe even 1/10th scale radio controlled cars for kids, and street racing, and homeless people who live in their cars.

Of course, cars aren’t alive because they can’t reproduce without us.Then again, viruses can’t reproduce without host cells and screwflies can’t reproduce without sheep. Maybe cars are parasites that we created.

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why a virus gets to be in the same category as trees and people and a car doesn’t.

But I think its pretty clear that rather than us designing cars, cars are redesigning our environment. I can only assume that over a sufficient amount of time, they will re-design us—that is, shape us through natural selection into people who do better with cars.

First order extrapolation—we get to be better drivers.

Somewhere in the second and third orders of extrapolation there’s a whopping good sf story.

I can’t wait to read it.