What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

The line frames modern technological danger as less frightening than the psychological and cultural appetite that grows around it. Ballard’s focus is not on the objective risk of future highways, but on the morbid fascination—especially among experts, planners, and spectators—with quantifying catastrophe: turning death into “parameters,” optimization problems, and elegant models. The quote critiques a technocratic mindset that aestheticizes violence and treats human bodies as data points, suggesting that the real ethical threat is our capacity to enjoy abstraction and control even when the subject is suffering. It aligns with Ballard’s recurring theme that modernity’s most disturbing developments are internal: shifts in desire, perception, and the erotic charge of disaster.