Brave New World and 1984 are left astray and brand new on my bookshelf. Accuse me for risking a snobbish literary elitist, but even the zealous dystopian man has to admit that this is not the golden age for dystopian novels. 

Yet, the augury in 1984 has already obtained IRL- at least in the entirety of North Korea and few parts of other Communist countries. I couldn’t help thinking: would the outlandish counterfactual, wherein promiscuity is advocated and mechanical creation of humans is de rigueur, become true one day?

My worries are not at all unfounded, as they somehow pertain to the mortifying occurrences of late in my city, Wuhan. The subject of public horror and blame is an innocuous automobile (or, to be precise, a bevy of identical automobiles): the shape of Tesla, coated in white, with innocent “Luobo Taxi” printed on the doors in austere black Chinese characters. But this is not any random car you see on the streets, it is a fully automated, driverless taxi that operates at the cheap expense of roughly .5 dollars per ten kilometers. Why are people directing their vehement complaints at this innocent, nascent vehicle?

I’m grossly dumbfounded. Per officials, these vehicles are likely to be avant-garde breakthroughs that mark the ingenuity of Baidu (the creator of the taxi) as well as the facilitation of traffic. However, per allegations, these innocuous inventions have caused inhibitions to the traffic. What blasphemy! One video presented the taxi in question being stopped by a sack, and refused to proceed until the sack was finally removed. Another displayed one bumping atrociously into a middle-aged woman, causing a minor hubbub.

It is unknown whether the woman is to get an amputation or a quadruple bypass. But these are irrelevant to our focus. The point is, according to the limited extant information, the innocuous little gadget is perhaps not harmless after all. Its administering harm at an innocent Wuhan woman and precluding the traffic suggests the disturbing and likely possibility of evil; In due course, we would at its best be fettered by serfdom towards our mechanical masters, who brandish whips and canes at us, whipping disobedient Wuhan civilians while steering particularly obstinate ones around the city, trampling into skyscrapers and domiciles, while leering and darting boastful glances at one another, parodying the lameness of human beings and the stupidity of anthropocentrism, or be at the lowermost echelon of the social hierarchy, the pinnacle of which is occupied exclusively by taxis (consider the Yuan dynasty,) and at its worst be divested of existence altogether, like that in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “There Will be Soft Rains.”

Behold, dystopia is at hand!