Cassandra complex

I’ve ridden in Waymo driverless taxis in both Miami and Austin and it is, as you would expect, a slightly surreal experience. When an empty vehicle turns up, displays your glowing initials on the roof, then invites you to unlock the doors via your phone, you feel as if you’re in a science-fiction film. Once you drive off, it feels doubly weird. Yet what’s most surprising is how quickly it ceases to feel strange. After three minutes, you pay scarcely more attention to the progress of the vehicle than you would when riding in a car driven by any competent human driver. A colleague of mine who has used Waymo on faster roads tells me you experience another burst of unease when the car first hits 50mph, but this, too, rapidly dissipates.

Pity the poor lumpfish. It’s lumbered with an unflattering name, or its equally unattractive moniker “sucker fish.” It also looks unappealing. The poor blighters are endowed with a stubby nose and knobbly, spotty, tubercular skin that gives them their lumpy look. With a carbuncled, ridged back, bulging eyes and a suction disc so it can attach itself to rocks, it hardly cuts the sexiest figure. But God bless the lumpfish, it does deliver poor man’s caviar in spades. It couldn’t look more different from the king of caviar, the sturgeon, which is the most elegant fish in the ocean. Long, sleek and silver, the sturgeon flows effortlessly through the water like Concorde flying through the sky. It has handsome stitching along its body.