I came across a phrase recently in Penelope Fitzgerald's introduction to J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country: the very last years of a lamplit, horse-drawn age. It struck a chord in our era of Waymo and Wayve.
There is something both worrying and wonderful in the fact that the people living through those years did not know they were the last. A man leaving a horse drawn cab onto a wet London street was simply going home. Someone lighting a lamp was simply trying to see. Yet for a brief moment the old world and the new one shared the same streets: horses beneath electric lights, motorcars travelling on pebbled streets designed for carriages, telephones ringing in houses whose occupants had been born before the railway reached their town. History makes change look sequential. One chapter finishes, another begins but life is rarely that neat. We tend to notice new things arriving much earlier than we notice old things disappearing. The future always arrives before the past has left.
Walking around London now, it's noticeable another chapter is ending. The black cab still moves along roads it has criss-crossed for generations, driven by someone who has spent years acquiring an extraordinary mental map of the city. And now, on those same roads, are cars who have learnt the city for themselves. One system built from memory, experience and human judgement; another from cameras, computation and millions of observations. For a while, at least, they will sit beside one another at traffic lights.
One day the idea of a person spending years memorising every street in London may feel as distant as the cab horse does now. Fitzgerald was writing of the very last years of a lamplit, horse-drawn age. Perhaps these are the very last years of a hand-driven, human-mapped one.