This morning, I received a notification for Tesla’s latest self-driving software update, so I tapped Install after arriving at school. When I got back in the car that afternoon and switched on self-driving as usual, I suddenly felt that this physical car had been made new by an update to something as intangible as software. The heart of a gas-powered car is its engine, but I think the heart of an electric car is its software. You cannot swap an engine back and forth, but you can switch software versions. Through engineers’ continual research and refinement, software can grow more powerful. In Tesla’s case, that power shows itself in better self-driving. I asked ChatGPT what had changed this time. It replied: “Going from V14.2 to V14.3.10, the most badass part isn’t a handful of new features. The whole FSD system has a better ‘brain’ and quicker reflexes. Tesla says the AI processing pipeline responds about 20% faster. It’s more decisive and composed in tricky situations—sudden cut-ins, complicated traffic signals, poor visibility, unusual obstacles, school buses, and emergency vehicles—and it follows traffic and chooses lanes more naturally. Then there’s the new active collision avoidance: when necessary, it can do more than brake, drawing directly on FSD’s driving capabilities to steer and evade. Put simply, V14.2 already knew how to drive well. V14.3.10 is faster, more confident in its decisions, and better at handling surprises and weird situations on the road.”
The update swept in like a tide. I could feel the difference firsthand, and once again I marveled at the Tesla team’s efficiency—and even more at human ingenuity.
As I traveled down the road, experiencing the new version of self-driving, that familiar excitement and happiness welled up inside me: the joy of a new technology making my life easier. I put on some beautiful music, basked in that unmistakable California sun, and let my eyes roam greedily over the mountains and scenery on either side. The smile on my face kept growing. My blood seemed to surge with excitement, flowing from my heart through every part of my body, carrying the feeling all the way to my fingertips.
I have felt this before. Every phone update, every chatbot update, every major technological breakthrough gives me this rush, and gives it to everyone whose life it touches.
But the excitement and happiness are temporary. Given time, the revolutionary becomes ordinary. Look at our lives today. Take any one element and set it down in the ancient world: people could not even have imagined it, let alone built it.
I often say to my friends that airplanes are already incredibly fast, yet people still complain about how long and exhausting a journey is. If one day we have passenger rockets that cross continents, will people still complain about how long the trip takes once they have grown used to them?
Human nature makes technological progress inevitable. We have so many needs, and those needs are the underlying force that creates opportunities for profit and drives technology forward. Yet another side of that same nature makes us quickly grow accustomed to anything new, leaving our appetites forever unsatisfied.
These days, I find myself looking forward to technological progress a little less. There is no end to it, and it can solve the practical problems of living without resolving our inner struggles. I have seen plenty of science fiction films in which people of the future have nothing to worry about. All they have to do is live. But that existence is hollow, empty, meaningless. What sets us apart from other animals is our need to find meaning in life.
We do not find that meaning in any of the things I have mentioned above. We find it in how we understand life and the people around us. Our relationships with one another matter more than our relationship with technology. When we spend so much time with technology that we forget the people beside us, life becomes dull and monotonous, however advanced that technology may be.
Every technological advance brings humanity as a whole closer to its ultimate destination—complete and utter boredom. When we finally get there, we will tear down technology’s cold framework with our own hands and realize, once again, that the simplest, most elemental way of life was the best all along.
要政阳
September 23, 2026, Santa Clara