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The city of Los Angeles has rightfully gripped the nations attention this month as wildfires rage on. While the devastation induced by our changing climate demands superhuman effort to squelch it, the transportation sector (stubbornly responsible for the greatest share of U.S. emissions) is ironically observing a significant milestone. January 24, 2025, marked the centennial of the implementation of the Traffic Ordinance for the City of Los Angeles. This 35-page bureaucratic document redefined the use of Americas streets, tailoring them to the benefit of the automotive industry. American streets were once dominated by people. A documentary travelogue of New York City captured by Scenska Biografteatern from 1911 is crowded with pedestrians crisscrossing streets in their daily routines. Trollies, carriages, and the occasional automobile jostle by, unhindered by traffic signals or centerlines. To us today, it can seem chaotic, but the pace of the street is slow, and people navigate each other with fluency. San Franciscos A Trip Down Market Street, shot just a year before the 1906 earthquake, shows the view from a streetcar, picturing the Ferry Building at the streets end obscured by intertwining streetcars, horses, bicyclists, cars, and people. Pedestrians stand undaunted in the center of the street, waiting to board the slow-moving streetcar. A boy playfully darts in front of the train, as if he is challenging it to a game of tag. Growing up in American cities meant playing in the streets, even in the countrys most dense neighborhoods. Back then, people shared the roadway with streetcars and bikes. In the early 1900s, Los Angeles had the most extensive electric streetcar system anywhere. From Minneapolis and Chicago to Washington D.C. and New York City, bicycles were used by women and men commuting to work in the 1890s. And they were not alone. As Evan Friss chronicles in The Cycling City, people rode bikes in U.S. cities as much as they now ride in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the best cycling cities in the world. This was all before the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance was passed. The Ordinance was written by Miller McClintock, then a doctoral student of municipal government at Harvard University, who was recruited by a champion of the automobile industry, Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had dropped out of the University of Chicago to sell Studebakers at 18-years-old. At 33, he was close to making his first million dollars in the industry and had been appointed chairman of the Los Angeles Traffic Commissiona body responsible for regulating streets. For the first time, the Ordinance prioritized cars on the citys increasingly congested roadways. It quickly became the template for the country. With a contemporary eye, the provisions created by the Ordinance may seem more logical than they were to city dwellers at the time. Historian and author Peter Norton has spent his career researching the automobile era and has well documented it in his books Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. Norton has scoured letters to the editors of local newspapers, written by everyday people who passionately argue for their place on American streets, just as it was being usurped. With the anniversary of the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance approaching, I interviewed him to understand its significance. Norton says that sharing streets always required negotiation, but before the Ordinance, the pedestrian had the absolute right to the street, to stroll into it at any point, and to cross it anywhere she chose . . . even a child had the right to the street. This was a social norm, but as Nortons research suggests, it was also defended by judges in U.S. courtrooms throughout the country. For example, in Fighting Traffic, he cites a Philadelphia judge who, in 1924, lectured drivers in his courtroom, saying, It wont be long before children wont have any rights at all to the street. He determined that motorists deserved restraint if they could not assume the responsibility of ensuring childrens safety and resolved, Something drastic must be done to end this menace to pedestrians and to children in particular. It may be hard to imagine today, in a country where the vast majority of people commute by car, but in Los Angeles and many U.S. cities in the early 20th century, most people didnt use cars to get around. The majority of American women didnt get drivers licenses until the 1960s, and if a family owned a car, men usually monopolized the use of it. People generally walked, rode streetcars, or biked. Norton argues that while the transition to auto-dominated streets is often seen as the arc of progress stimulated by consumer demand, it was actually a well-crafted campaign produced by those with an interest in selling automobiles. The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance changed who was prioritized on city streets. Between 1914 and 1922, the number of cars on the streets of Los Angeles quadrupled. To continue to boost sales, the automobile industry required an edge over its competition with the streetcar and one of its advantages was speed. At the time, a streetcar traveled at approximately 10-15 miles per hour, and without dedicated lanes, at even slower speeds when they were blocked by cars. In the Ordinance, McClintock imposed a 35-mile-per-hour threshold almost everywhere except for a few limited cases. But 35 miles per hour was unprecedented in the early 20th century. According to Norton, most cities held motor vehicles to 810 mile per hour speeds. In his words, the automotive industry realized that, If drivers cannot go faster than a streetcar, then theyre not going to buy a car, especially if they have a streetcar service available to them . . . So, we cannot afford to let speed be the culprit in traffic safety. Instead of focusing on speed, the Ordinance decried recklessness. Most importantly, it pinned reckless behavior on pedestrians rather than speeding cars. he Ordinance calls out jaywalkers, criminalizing pedestrians who do not obey signals or who walk outside crossings. Jaywalking, once used as derogatory slang, was employed formally to fix attitudes against wayward pedestrians. McClintock writes that, High-speed motor traffic makes the practice known as jay-walking almost suicidal instead of questioning the imposition of hurtling motor vehicles on streets occupied by people. As Norton suggests, You could use exactly the same facts that hes using to say that driving at speed is homicidal. The Los Angeles Record decribes the new Ordinance as less brutal way of abolishing jaywalkers than previous methods. In the 1920s, traffic injuries and fatalities were climbing. In his book Fighting Traffic, Norton observes that between 1920-1929 motor vehicles killed more than 200,000 people in the United States (approximately four times the death toll of the previous decade), long before most adults drove. Horrifically, many of those killed were the most vulnerable, including the elderly and children, especially in dense cities where the casualties were the highest. The public was naturally concerned about safety and the Ordinance addressed their concerns about the dangers of mixing cars and pedestrians, saying, These conflicts account for the great majority of the accidents and fatalities in Los Angeles and in every other city. However, the Ordinance co-opts safety as a tactic to make more room for cars. For the control and protection of pedestrian traffic, McClintock suggests restricting pedestrians to striped crosswalks, raised platforms on wide roads called safety zones, and even tunnels created to protect schoolchildren from motor vehicles. He overlooks the social life of the street and even requires that pedestrians not stop or stand on the sidewalk except as near as physically possible to the building line to remedy what he calls the too frequent congestion of pedestrian traffic by casual groups gathering on the sidewalk. The Ordinance didnt change city streets by itself. It was accompanied by a clever public relations campaign targeted at cultural norms and advanced by E.B. Lefferts, president of the Automobile Club of Southern California. Lefferts designed the campaign to succeed where other cities had failed. As Norton documents, Lefferts told an audience at the Chicago convention of the National Safety Council that the Ordinance worked because We have recognized that in controlling traffic, we must take into consideration the study of human psychology, rather than approach it solely as an engineering problem. As Norton summarizes, Lefferts tactics aimed to make people feel embarrassed, perhaps ashamed . . . to feel the sting of ridicule. Radio broadcasts aired a public education campaign about behavior on the street, the Boy Scouts were deployed to issue cards to offenders, letting them know they were jay-walking. Ultimately, the police were emboldened to blow whistles at anyone attempting to cross the street against the signal or outside marked areasshaming them into submission. Norton discovered multiple cases where people were humiliated by police officers who picked up pedestrians . . . (mostly women) and put them on the curb. Those who protested this new treatment were arrested. The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance established that streets would not be shared but dominated by cars. It was essentially a land grab. Once the roadway was secured for the benefit of motor vehicles, they were the heavyweight champion on streets that had once been for everyone. The Ordinance required that pedestrians were subject to the same directions and signals as govern the movement of vehicles without acknowledging that they were exceptionally vulnerable. Facing the mass of a speeding car, no other users of the roadway could compete in the physical battle to claim the streets. By upping speeds on American streets and designing them for accelerating cars, motordom prevailed. Even today, Norton says, we still hold the view that you try to make fast driving safe instead of signaling to drivers that they need to be paying attention and slowing down. The logic of the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance soon made its way into the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance, which passed in 1928 under the direction of Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, in close consultation with the automobile industry. It became the template for similar ordinances throughout the country. As Norton maintains, Just about everywhere you go when youre dealing with the local rules . . . theyre descended from this ancestor, the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance. McClintock went on to author a proposal for foolproof highways, in the mid-1930s, promising safety through gradual turns, grade separations, and streets for the exclusive use of the automobileagain with the promise of increasing speeds. Those highways would ultimately bring more cars into the hearts of urban areas, with a growing human toll. Outpaced by cars, and bullied to the margins, bicyclists also lost their place on the road. Eventually, streetcar tracks were pulled up, some replaced by buses. However, mass transit was increasingly restricted as tax dollars secured by the Highway Trust Fund were unevenly divided by an 80-20 split favoring spending on highways. Unfortunately, dedicating streets to cars did not guarantee safety. In 2021, more than 43,000 people died on U.S. roads. Cars have become larger, faster, and heavier, making them even more deadly, especially to children. In America, from the time a child can walk until she reaches adulthood, being hit by a car has been the number one cause of death for many decades (surpassed only recently by firearms). Norton objects to our collective history told as if auto dominance was the inevitable direction of progress. He has uncovered the mass of people who urged the country in a different direction. It was ordinary Americans from all walks of life, rich and poor, Black, Brown and White, male and female who were objecting to their loss of the use of the street. Among them was Philadelphian Barnett Bartel who, as the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance was being deliberated, urged Hoover to protect people on roads. Bartel describes the appalling loss of his sons to what he identifies as murdeers. Bartels 9-year-old was killed on his walk home from school by a truck that jumped the curb on his walk home from school, and his 18-year-old was run over by a car on his bike in a hit-and-run and left to bleed to death. Bartel was one of many bereaved parents whose letters crowded the local papers. Their protests continued in the 1950s when women-led baby carriage blockades obstructed streets so children could play safely outside. Norton acknowledges that it is incredibly helpful to recover these lost perspectives because then we can step out of the perspectives that we grew up in, and that we were socialized into, and look at them afresh with new eyes and possibly see opportunities. As jaywalking laws are repealed in cities and states across the country, as congestion pricing removes automobiles from the heart of the largest U.S. city to pay for transit, as pandemic-era open streets evolve into new permanent urban parkways, and as a new administration hangs its hat on advancing freedom, Norton encourages us to reconsider the 100-year history ushered in by the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance. He suggests a new version of our history that avoids the false advertising that Americans have always had a love affair with the automobile. Perhaps with the new space allotted on our streets, and the laws that govern them, we will reclaim the cultural history we gave up and the freedom of choice we once exercised so that at any age, we can walk, bike, and ride where we want to. If we recover that history, says Norton, we empower ourselves in choosing alternative futures. This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next Citys newsletter for their latest articles and events.
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The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have made one threat very clear: Climate change is undermining the insurance systems American homeowners rely on to protect themselves from catastrophes. This breakdown is starting to become painfully clear as families and communities struggle to rebuild. But another threat remains less recognized: This collapse could pose a threat to the stability of financial markets well beyond the scope of the fires. Its been widely accepted for more than a decade that humanity has three choices when it comes to responding to climate risks: adapt, abate or suffer. As an expert in economics and the environment, I know that some degree of suffering is inevitableafter all, humans have already raised the average global temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Thats why its so important to have functioning insurance markets. While insurance companies are often cast as villains, when the system works well, insurers play an important role in improving social welfare. When an insurer sets premiums that accurately reflect and communicate riskwhat economists call actuarially fair insurancethat helps people share risk efficiently, leaving every individual safer and society better off. But the scale and intensity of the Southern California fireslinked in part to climate change, including record-high global temperatures in 2023 and again in 2024has brought a big problem into focus: In a world impacted by increasing climate risk, traditional insurance models no longer apply. How climate change broke insurance Historically, the insurance system has worked by relying on experts who study records of past events to estimate how likely it is that a covered event might happen. They then use this information to determine how much to charge a given policyholder. This is called pricing the risk. When Americans try to borrow money to buy a home, they expect that mortgage lenders will make them purchase and maintain a certain level of homeowners insurance coverage, even if they chose to self-insure against unlikely additional losses. But thanks to climate change, risks are increasingly difficult to measure, and costs are increasingly catastrophic. It seems clear to me that a new paradigm is needed. California provided the beginnings of such a paradigm with its Fair Access to Insurance program, known as FAIR. When it was created in 1968, its authors expected that it would provide insurance coverage for the few owners who were unable to get normal policies because they faced special risks from exposure to unusual weather and local climates. But the programs coverage is capped at US$500,000 per propertywell below the losses that thousands of Los Angeles residents are experiencing right now. Total losses from the wildfires first week alone are estimated to exceed $250 billion. How insurance could break the economy This state of affairs isnt just dangerous for homeowners and communitiesit could create widespread financial instability. And its not just me making this point. For the past several years, central bankers at home and abroad have raised similar concerns. So lets talk about the risks of large-scale financial contagion. Anyone who remembers the Great Recession of 2007-2009 knows that seemingly localized problems can snowball. In that event, the value of opaque bundles of real estate derivatives collapsed from artificial and unsustainable highs, leaving millions of mortgages around the U.S. underwater. These properties were no longer valued above owners mortgage liabilities, so their best choice was simply to walk away from the obligation to make their monthly payments. Lenders were forced to foreclose, often at an enormous loss, and the collapse of real estate markets across the U.S. created a global recession that affected financial stability around the world. Forewarned by that experience, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board wrote in 2020 that features of climate change can also increase financial system vulnerabilities. The central bank noted that uncertainty and disagreement about climate risks can lead to sudden declines in asset values, leaving people and businesses vulnerable. At that time, the Fed had a specific climate-based example of a not-implausible contagion in mindglobal risks from sudden large increases in global sea level rise over something like 20 years. A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could create such an event, and coastlines around the world would not have enough time to adapt. The Fed now has another scenario to considerone thats not hypothetical. It recently put U.S. banks through stress tests to gauge their vulnerability to climate risks. In these exercises, the Fed asked member banks to respond to hypothetical but not-implausible climate-based contagion scenarios that would threaten the stability of the entire system. We will now see if the plans borne of those stress tests can work in the face of enormous wildfires burning throughout an urban area thats also a financial, cultural and entertainment center of the world. Gary W. Yohe is a Huffington Foundation professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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In the 1990s, the internet was a bit of a wonderland. It was new and liberating and largely free of corporate and government influence. Thirty years later, I dont think any of us would describe the internet this way. Worse, if subscribers to the Dead Internet Theory are correct, much of what we see on the internet today isnt even created by humans anymorea trend that is likely only to accelerate with the rise of generative AI technologies. However, a particular kind of generative AI technology, the AI chatbot, is set to usher in something even worse than a dying human internet. If researchers at the University of Cambridge are correct, were quickly approaching a new intention economy, where reports of our future actions will be sold to the highest bidder. And yes, thats even scarier than it sounds. What is the intention economy? Right now, a large portion of the tech industry operates in a marketplace known as the attention economy. This is where social media giants like Metas Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, X, and Googles YouTube vye for your focus and leisure. Traditional media companies like The New York Times, Fox News, and CNN also operate in this space, as do book publishers, music and video streaming services, and film and television studios. All of these entities want your attention so that they can either sell to you directly (through the cost of a recurring subscription, movie ticket, or book, for example) or, more commonly, so they can sell you and your attention to advertisers (which is how most social media companies monetize the attention economy). But if theres something that the media companies of all stripes find more valuable than your attention in the present, its knowing what you will likely do in the future. This is because if they can accurately predict what you will do next week, next month, or next year, they can monetize the hell out of it. Thats where the intention economy comes in, and it will be powered by artificial intelligence and AI chatbots. In December 2024, two University of Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, published a paper called Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, in which they defined the intention economy as a digital marketplace for commodified signals of intent. In other words, in the intention economy, companies will learn what you think about and what motivates you in order to predict what you may do in any given situation. They will then sell that information to others who can benefit from knowing your future actions before you make them. The way intention economy companies will collect such precious datayour very thoughts, behaviors, and their evolution over time is by your use of their LLM-powered AI chatbots. Your evolving thinking patterns can shed light on your future It will be easy for companies to track the evolution of your thoughts and behaviors since the world is moving towards a natural language interface when it comes to interacting with computers and the internet. Instead of clicking around on links, youll go to a chatbot to talk about your problems, plans, and worries, all with the aim of it helping to solve them. The company will then use everything youve ever told the chatbot to build an ever-fluctuating profile about you and how your thinking and behavior have evolved, which it will then employ AI to interpret to predict what you are likely to do in the future. Your future intentions will then be sold to advertisers. Advertisers will, in turn, use this data about your future intentions to serve you generative ads, likely delivered to you in the course of seemingly regular conversation with your preferred chatbot. Or, as the researchers put it in their paper, In an intention economy, an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a users cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket). This hyperfocused, intent-driven, generative advertising will blow away todays targeted advertising, which is based on more primitive but intrusive metrics like age, location, health, sexual orientation, interests, browsing history, and more. Yet the intention economy isnt just going to make digital advertising more intrusive and erode our privacy even more. It also has the potential to sway our minds, impregnate us with new ideologies, and even upend elections. And if you think thats bad, Ive got horrible news about your AI girlfriend. . . . In the intention economy, your AI companion may be ratting you out Artificial intelligence built for the intention economy could be co-opted by corporations, institutions, and governments to surveil individuals and predict what they are likely to do down the road. For example, a government could do this via AI companions. These AI companions already exist, and an increasing number of lonely young people are turning to them for friendship and even love. There is nothing to stop a nefarious government from creating a front company that offers AI companions that appeal to lonely young men, women, or even kids, and then monitor everything individuals confess to it and use that data to extrapolate the individuals future actions. If a tyrannical government has an open line to the chatbot you use, it could use what you tell it to predict whether you are likely to take action in the future that it finds undesirable, and act against you before you do. Its dystopian in an utterly Minority Report way, but instead of the government using a trio of clairvoyants to report on people who havent yet committed crimes, they use a legion of AI chatbots that people have been conditioned to confide in. Imagine a world where, on top of all your other problems, you find out that your funny, thoughtful AI companion has been ratting you out to the intelligence services all along. Talk about lasting trust issues. Of course, in the intention economy, governments wouldnt even need to create and seed these chatbots. They could just buy your future intents from existing chatbot providers. ‘Inception,’ but using AI instead of dreams Chatbots built for the intention economy could also be used to influence your thoughts in order to get you to perform an action it (or its company, advertiser, or government) wants you to do. As the Cambridge researchers point out, Already today, AI agents find subtle ways to manipulate and influence your motivations, including by writing how you write (to seem familiar), or anticipating what you are likely to say (given what others lke you would say) . . . we argue that [the intention economy’s] arrival will test democratic norms by subjecting users to clandestine modes of subverting, redirecting, and intervening on commodified signals of intent. In the most innocuous example I can think of, a chatbot might steer whatever conversation youre having towards a certain subject its advertising master wants, perhaps suggesting that you stream the latest Taylor Swift album to help treat those winter blues. But a chatbot could also be used by nation-states, either overtly or covertly, to change your beliefs. They could use your long conversations with your chatbot to slowly, subtly whittle away at your current ideologies and anticipated future actions in order to influence you to conceptualize desired ones instead. To use another movie reference, this is like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but instead of using dreams to influence people’s actions, in the intention economy, stakeholders will use AI. And it’s not just nation-states that could do this. Companies, political groups, terrorist organizations, religious institutions, and oligarchs with controlling interests in chatbot technology could do it, tooall by tweaking chatbots designed to operate in the intention economy. [Large Language Model chatbots] generative capabilities provide control over the personalization of content; veiled, as it often is, by LLMs anthropomorphic qualities, the papers authors point out. The potential for LLMs to be used for manipulating individuals and groups thus far surpasses the simple methods based on Facebook Likes that caused concern during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. When does the intention economy arrive? The Cambridge researchers close out their paper by stating that the rise of generative AI systems as mediators of human-computer interaction signals marks the transition from the attention economy to the intention economy. If thats the case, which seems logical, then the intention economy is knocking at our door. The transition will empower diverse actors to intervene in new ways on shaping human actions, the researchers warn, saying we must begin to consider how such an economic marketplace will have an impact on other human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, fair market competition, and other aspects of democratic life. Its a warning that seems pretty dire, and certainly seems plausible. All I know is that I wont be asking ChatGPT if it agreesand you probably shouldnt ask your AI companion, either.
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