Just across the border from Hong Kong rises Shenzhen, a city of 18 million people that much of the Western world has barely noticed.
It’s a mind-boggling success in many regards, having grown from a backwater fishing town in 1979 to a megalopolis with, it claims, a window on the future. In some respects it delivers on that promise: After a drone brought us drinks in a park, we hailed a self-driving taxi, for example. And while I know these exist elsewhere, this was my first time consciously putting my life in the hands of unsupervised software. (Yes, I know software doesn’t have hands.)
But the truly weird thing about being in a taxi with no driver was that it didn’t feel weird at all. Maybe the future is like that.
