Matt Crawford, on dirt biking as an example of the “humanizing possibilities” of risk:

The feeling of exposure one has on a dirt bike recalls one to a basic truth: We are fragile, embodied beings. There is a certain risk that is inherent in moving around, by whatever means. A responsible person does everything he can to minimize this risk. Yet is risk somehow bound up with humanizing possibilities? […]

The heightened contingency of driving off-road resembles walking in the faith it enacts—that of throwing oneself into the world with hope. The ancient Greeks had a single word to express the condition of being “without a road,” when the way forward is not clear: aporia. It represents a moment pregnant with the arrival of something unlooked for.

These experiences of serendipity and faith feel a bit scarce in contemporary culture, and the language for articulating them seems to be fading from common use. We have a vision of the future in which there would be little scope for such moments. The most authoritative voices in commerce and technology express a determination to eliminate contingency from life as much as possible, and replace it with machine-generated certainty. That’s what automation does, whatever else it may accomplish. More broadly, a need for certainty is expressed in the project to expand rational control over domains that remain intolerably wild. At times, this project comes untethered from any utility-maximizing logic and looks more like a compulsion. It reveals a metaphysical orientation that seems a bit cramped, or timid.