Welcome back to the wonderful world of scientific progress, the advancement of the cause of humanity, and really bitchin’ gizmos.

Speaking of which, we have this particularly squirmy gadget that might well revolutionize digestive medicine forever : a self-propelling endoscopic probe that can ‘swim’ your entire digestive tract in just a couple of hours, taking detailed picture all the way.

It does this by squirming like a tadpole, which I imagine many of you are also doing while imagining a little robot squirming its way through your intestines. But it’s less than half an inch in diameter, and a couple of inches long, so it’s not like you would really feel it. And it can go in either end, depending on what the doctor wants to see.

And if doing the entire intestinal tract in just two hours doesn’t sound like an impressive rate of speed, remember that we have forty feet of small intestine alone. So in reality, a two inch object covering that distance in just two hours without so much as bruising a single villi is pretty darn impressive.

And speaking as someone who has had an older style of endoscopic examination of my digestive system (actually two, one from one end and one from the other, and trust me, the other is WAY easier), I am all for anything that makes that smoother and easier on the patient.

Not exactly a painful experience, but speaking for the top-down one, I sincerely hope I never have to swallow a camera the size of a baby’s fist attached to a cord that looks like something a heavy metal band would use to hook up their amps again. It’s profoundly fucked up.

Well, so much for other news. What’s up in the world of self-driving cars?

(I swear, I didn’t plan this, it’s just that two more cool stories on this subject came up lately. )

First up, the state of Nevada, always an innovator, has become the first state to officially legalize the self-driving car.

This means that the first legal hurdle facing the dawn of the self-driving vehicle has been leapt. The technology is advancing with extraordinary rapidity, and the need for a jurisdiction where one can legally test vehicles on public roads will be coming faster than we would ever have thought just a few years ago.

Of course, there’s still a lot of ground to cover before then. Actually integrating self-driving cars into traditional traffic will be the final step in the process, and the most risky, not to mention the most controversial. I am curious as to whether it will be highway driving or city driving first. Highway driving is simpler on some levels, but more dense. City traffic is less dense but more unpredictable. We shall see.

But having a state where you can build up to that point without legal barriers is going to help a lot.

All hail the coming electric self-driving car future! Imagine the individual autonomy that will allow.

The other cool bit of self-driving car news is from those hard working Germans at Volkswagen, who have announced their development of a ‘temporary autopilot’ system for their cars.

Now relax, it’s not as cool as that sounds. But it’s close!

It’s a logical extension of the modern trend in “smart driving” cars that avoid collisions, make parking easier, and so on. While this system is active during highway driving, it monitors your lane to keep you in it, maintains a safe distance from the car ahead of you, and even automatically slows you down when going into a bend in the road.

How cool is that? Already, the car is a better driver than half the people on the road. I am wondering if this system could actually improve your mileage.

Of course, you as the driver can take over at any moment. Helping people avoid accidents is one thing, but asking them to totally trust the car is another.

To me, this is like the ultimate form of cruise control. It’s not really autopilot exactly, because it’s not like you would be safe completely letting your mind wander or anything (for one thing, you would miss your exit), but it could still reduce the stress and strain of driving considerably.

And of course, the more systems like this on the road, the safer driving will be. I am hoping that I will live long enough to see a future where they look back at how casually we accept the high death toll that accompanies our love (and need) of the automobile, and shudder at such callous barbarity.

After all, we all know you are a safe and responsible driver, but what about all those other maniacs and morons out there?

Work sucks. Everybody knows it.

Work is the main thing that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Even if you never get married, never have kids, never assume a mortgage, never even own a car, you have to work. And that means being reliable, having responsibilities, accepting authority, and doing a lot of things which aren’t fun and which you have to do whether you feel like it or not.

This sucks, and the child inside us will never truly understand it. It wants to just go and play and indulge itself and never worry about anything. That’s what children want. And if we left it at that, our children would have every reason to view the coming of adulthood with great dread.

But in modern society, we have created a dream of a perfect workaround for this problem, and it is this dream which we teach our child. The dream is of the job that is not a job, the job that you enjoy so much that it is far more like play than work.

It is a dream we called “a career”.

The idea is promulgated by guidance counselors, teachers, children’s media figures, and our cultural backdrop in general. As you trod the pathways of the educational system, you will slowly discover what it is you truly enjoy doing and what you are good at. (These might not be the same thing, but they don’t tell you that. )

By the end of the process, so the story goes, you will have a good enough idea of what career path best suits your personality, skills, goals, and desired lifestyle. That way, you can slip into the world of work with the minimum of pain and with clear goals and achievements planned out in front of you.

That’s the dream sold to all children, and it is sold with the best of intentions and the honest belief that life can be just like that. But there are a number of problems with this idea.

For one, it does not take into account the asymmetry of competition resulting from the imbalance of number of jobs versus the number of people who may desire that job. There is no system or force in modern society to insure that there is the same number of every possible job as there are people who are leaving the educational system with that job as their life goal. Some jobs, generally obscure or inglorious ones, may starve for fresh blood, while others, generally ones that in some way appeal to the notion of “getting paid to play”, like the arts and sciences, may well have a massive glut of potential candidates, and this mathematically guarantees that the vast majority of them will have their dreams crushed.

Hardly seems like we are doing our children a kindness by setting them on this path, does it?

And even those who somehow survive this mad and brutal race for the small number of brass rings on the crazy merry go round of adult life face disillusionment and disappointment, because there is no such thing as a job that is not work.

No matter what you do, no matter how much it supposedly suits you, there will still be aspects of it that you simply do not like. Just the act of taking something you enjoy doing in your own time and turning it into something you are obligated to do whether you feel like it or not can turn a sweet dream sour. You may find yourself hating the very thing you worked so hard to make into a career.

And even if you don’t lose all appetite for that which you once loved, there will still be a lot of aspects of the job that are not loads of fun. You will likely have to follow a timetable, get up when you would rather be asleep, make compromises when you would prefer not to, and do all kinds of things that are simply not part of the brochure you got on Career Day.

So taken as a whole, I am forced to ask whether this “career dream” that we teach to our children is really the best thing for them and society in the long run. Might be we better off giving our children a more realistic (but still highly positive) idea of what lies ahead?

We have gotten away with selling this dream for so long because by the time the downside hits home, the child has become an adult and is therefore considered responsible for their own destiny.

But who is really to blame when the dreams we feed our children turn sour as adults?