The Chauffeur Problem (1999)

8/20/2026 at 11:40:43 AM

This article just seems a little bit unbelievable

> They ran roughshod over their new bosses. They went joyriding in the expensive cars in their care. Of course, they too skimmed their operations money, but they did so without the veneer of social decorum.

The word "roughshod" seems wholly unjustified unless it is some sort of pun on horses that I'm missing. I can imagine a chauffeur joyriding and skimming money, but to say that represents "run[ning] roughshod" seems a bit much. The employer obviously wasn't showing that much care to the money and how big a deal is it if the guy drives the car occasionally? The coachman was skimming money and could ride the horse around if he put his mind to it. The horse isn't going to dob him in.

> I spent years at the mercy of technical typists. They were underpaid, but they were in control.

Again, I don't see how "in control" can be used to describe an underpaid technical typist. It doesn't sound that hard to check what they typed and replace them with someone else. If they're underpaid then they're easy enough to replace.

I wouldn't usually jump at two word choices, but the article seems to hinge on some sort of power imbalance favouring employees that is not demonstrated.

by roenxi

8/20/2026 at 11:59:13 AM

It's written from the perspective of one of the masters.

> The role of the head coachman was well defined. Toward his superiors, he was deferential and obedient.

So the chauffeurs and typists are not as deferential and obedient as the author would like.

by waisbrot

8/20/2026 at 12:36:37 PM

The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up. "Ran roughshod" is overkill, I suspect, for the fact that the mechanic/chauffeurs did not come from a servant background, where the slightest failure to observe decorum could result in dismissal (or worse, being made an indentured servant for several years - in slightly earlier years).

by IAmBroom

8/20/2026 at 2:06:34 PM

Kind of like how programmers today refuse to wear suits: roughshod in the minds of the elite.

by qarl2

8/20/2026 at 2:27:24 PM

> The author never lived in that era, and is making some of that shit up.

Lienhard cites Borg [0], who is writes "Between 1903 and 1912 howls of protest arose over chauffeurs’ arrogance and insubordination and the pages of the automotive trade press overflowed with letters, articles, and editorials describing, complaining about, and offering solutions to the 'chauffeur problem.'" [1]

One might quibble about a specific subjective characterization or if the description should use the norms of the period or today, but that is a far cry from "making some of that shit up."

0. Borg, K., The "Chauffeur Problem" in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology. Technology and Culture, Vol. 40, No. 4, October 1999, pp. 797-832.

1. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/33428

by adolph

8/20/2026 at 7:56:18 PM

I stand corrected.

by IAmBroom

8/20/2026 at 8:44:07 PM

Cheers.

Lienhard is a Houston institution (warts and all, some people can't stand listening to his voice) and having listened to his show forever, some "don't you neg that nice John Lienhard" energy really came out.

by adolph

8/20/2026 at 12:49:04 PM

Regarding the typists: 1. The author was born in 1930 and probably did have a secretarial pool to handle transcribing his notes into typewritten pages for publication.

2. Roenxi, I don't know where you are from, but you could check into how people are at the mercy of bureaucrats in the Department of Motor Vehicles in the USA if you want a similar complaint to being at the mercy of low paid, low-skilled workers with bosses that don't report to you.

You might also check into Kafka. He is pretty much famous for describing the problem.

by readthenotes1

8/20/2026 at 1:16:02 PM

While I dearly love Kafka, I am not sure it’s correct to look at him as a documentarian of realistic social behaviors.

by brookst

8/20/2026 at 2:10:18 PM

There's a big difference between being at the mercy of government bureaucrats and what is described here, which is being at the mercy of an employee acting above his station (paraphrasing the author).

by malfist

8/20/2026 at 2:18:48 PM

Are you familiar with our employment laws? Firing someone can cause the bureaucracy to be involved.

by voakbasda

8/20/2026 at 2:31:08 PM

There is exactly one state in the US that does not have at will employment.

by malfist

8/20/2026 at 3:35:54 PM

That is not the only employment law.

Firing someone translates to a higher likelihood that they will seek revenge, and it is trivial to get the state to accomplish that (e.g. filing a false claim).

This potential liability causes a lot of side effects, such as refusing to give references to former employees. Or ever asking any personal questions about any topics surrounding protected status.

by voakbasda

8/20/2026 at 11:50:51 AM

If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?

by tarkin2

8/20/2026 at 1:13:10 PM

How is it different from relying on the internet, when most people don’t know what a routing table is, let alone how to manage one? Or from relying on word processors that the average user could never write themselves?

Civilization has always been about upwards abstraction, with a small number of specialists understanding the lower levels that everything’s built on. From sewer systems to cobol in banking, it’s always been this way.

I think the reason we see these reactions on e.g. HN is that we are the class of people going from “we understand the pinnacle of tech” to “we need to rely on opaque tech to do our jobs” and it’s kind of scary and personal because of the change.

by brookst

8/20/2026 at 2:23:09 PM

This is how we got cars that require visiting the dealership to get serviced, because they have total control over the ecosystem.

by voakbasda

8/20/2026 at 8:05:27 PM

Yes, exactly. As compared to 70 years ago, when cars came with a manual on how to adjust the spark gap, and buyers were expected to do so.

It turns out most people don't want to be under the hoods of their cars, so cars are optimized for that, and the few people who do want to do that maintenance (me included) are no longer the target market.

Meanwhile, everyone else can think about other things.

by brookst

8/20/2026 at 1:36:54 PM

I guess by practising the lower level things less and less we become less able to understand and maintain them, whereas any profession that required continued practice kept you sharp enough to learn things like networking.

by tarkin2

8/20/2026 at 12:10:08 PM

Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.

by Tangurena2

8/20/2026 at 12:26:18 PM

> If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

Yup if you did not anticipate correctly where the spark plug would fire.

by srean

8/20/2026 at 12:51:04 PM

Now we have Uber and Lyft. You can have a chaffeur on call.

by Finnucane

8/20/2026 at 12:34:07 PM

> Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).

by TacticalCoder

8/20/2026 at 2:16:43 PM

It's almost as if proving you are technically competent is the new problem.

You can prove that you are a mechanic and driver, since the car obviously works and gets from A to B.

Now anyone can call themselves an expert because AI makes it easy.

As engineers we know that understanding fundamentals of these complex systems is essential but the average person only sees that Bob built an app for the back office and it seems to work. At best they understand that tech is complex and maybe there's a security flaw in his app.

Ultimately shiny things win, people don't want to hear that anything is hard and they will generally take a risk until something fails rather than pontificate on the best way to do it (unless of course they are in architecture, compliance or security in which case they will complain but leadership will already be showing off the cool new thing)

by jiaosdjf

8/20/2026 at 2:36:20 PM

We are the chauffeurs. They're going to drive their own computers now.

by chr15m

8/20/2026 at 2:16:41 PM

Is there a date on this? It's so vague, it could have been written in the 1970s, but it has a reference to 1999.

Edit: Found it here, https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episodedates

> 1999 — Episodes 1386-1505

(this was #1495)

That link is on the homepage.

by tantalor

8/20/2026 at 3:25:40 PM

Right, 1999 per episode dates.

by dredmorbius

8/20/2026 at 10:38:57 AM

Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it? It gets to the end of what feels like the introduction, and then just... stops.

by tom_

8/20/2026 at 3:30:16 PM

The podcast the article is based on runs only 3m38s, so the text length seems about right.

Public radio used to have spots for short features at the end of flagship programming, slots that are now almost universally filled by sponsorship slots.

(That's one of the things which has made listening to radio, even public radio, in the US, far more tedious to me.)

by dredmorbius

8/20/2026 at 11:13:18 AM

It’s formatted strangely… an excerpt from the book at the bottom of the page? The authors don’t match. Or maybe that footnote’s for the images…

It doesn’t need to be any longer; one of the ironic byproducts of our newest computer companions is that, even in the age of short-form content, they produce reams of rubbish, very rarely containing anything of consequence.

This, in contrast, is refreshing.

[Edit] doh, the reference is explained in the first line of the thing.

by Caracas288

8/20/2026 at 11:27:59 AM

I also can't tell when it was written exactly, given the reference to typists and file clerks being replaced "during the past twenty years".

by suddenlybananas

8/20/2026 at 11:46:20 AM

Definitely seems 20th century given the novelty around computers. The audio inclusion is beautiful, hardly see anything like that anywhere else, with music too.

by Caracas288

8/20/2026 at 1:10:19 PM

20 years ago would have been 2006. Hardly a bunch of secretaries banging on typewriters back then. Hell that was when MySpace started to fall apart

by malfist

8/20/2026 at 11:48:16 AM

https://engines.egr.uh.edu/

> The Engines of Our Ingenuity tells how human creativity forms our culture, using radio and podcasts.

> This site holds transcripts of all episodes since the show's inception in 1988, and many other features.

by pahbloo

8/20/2026 at 12:19:08 PM

Ha! it pays to do a little research, I should have done so.

So it's something like 'Thought for the Day' on the radio...

by Caracas288

8/20/2026 at 3:30:59 PM

1999, from some digging. Now noted in the title.

by dredmorbius

8/20/2026 at 12:59:15 PM

> Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it?

The "article" is the transcript of a radio segment/story (the audio clip at the top).

by throw0101d

8/20/2026 at 8:12:42 AM

> (Theme music)

I like this guy already.

by ezekiel68

8/20/2026 at 4:06:14 PM

“ replaced with computers and with people who know how to use them”

One of those things is true…

by pragmatic

8/20/2026 at 3:34:20 PM

Another substitution that passes almost unnoticed today was elevator operators.

Elevators were complicated equipment which could kill people (and still occasionally do).

Otis's Safety Brake (1850) made elevators possible, but it was automated controls (and scheduling systems) which made self-service elevators possible. Apparently stimulated by an elevator operators strike in 1945:

<https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/historical-event-pushed-eleva...>

Fully-automated self-service elevators still took about a decade to appear, but would have been fairly common by the late 1950s / 1960s.

by dredmorbius

8/21/2026 at 10:51:45 AM

Elevator operators are my favorite example of "job displaced by technology that nobody would even think of bringing back today".

by pjc50

8/20/2026 at 2:58:12 AM

Sorry for not trying to be inventive but merely maybe contrarian

I've come to think that one unequivocal upside of "affordable ASI" would be to bring about a world of discourse where discursers would hesitate to think of (not to mention carry) themselves as experts.

[Perhaps it reminds me of Le Guin's thoughts on tech X power, especially as represented in The Dispossessed]

it would seem not just rude, but even snide, to bias your interlocutor towards not carefully verifying the dependencies of your arguments

Widely dispersed and affordable AI would help because it (certainly, imho) makes the alternative, "trust but verify", so easy

And it would be strictly easier than using cloud chatGPT to sow misinformation because there are extra steps in that (--- nonsockpuppets would be inclined to verify the gist of what they are about to say as indeed misleading)

[As a bonus, this seems compatible with TFA, non-ideological anti-anti-intellectualism, and

https://schipper.ai/posts/technical-leaders-should-have-the-...

if we default to assuming that technical leaders should be different (not more, not less) than expert engineers ]

by oliculipolicula

8/20/2026 at 9:14:00 AM

[dead]

by aaron695