It’s easy to adopt the mindset that progress for the sake of the progress, never mind progress for the sake of Super Smash Bros. (1999-present) fanatics and squeegee enthusiasts, is an inherent and unquestionable good. This perspective is convenient and intuitive; ideology, the dogma of a Christian Scientist or the ravings of a polemic philosopher gone haywire, for instance, seems like all that could conceivably lead someone to reject triumphs like neuroprosthetics, supercomputers and my latest Candy Crush (2012) high score.
Safety, however, especially as technological advancements continue to be made, requires devil’s advocacy and prudence to assess the potential dangers of marching ceaselessly and heedlessly into a future made of silicon. What are the disadvantages and shortcomings of technology? And what are the consequences of relying on it?
Before tackling technology’s shortcomings, which I’ll do next week as well (you know, so I can be verbose), it’s interesting to note that these consequences can be linked to technology’s benefits; the service of machinery boils down to efficiency, but stupid efficiency. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman demonstrated this with an allegory about filing clerks.
There exists a clerk whose job it is to take out employee data cards and multiply how much each sold that month with each’s commission rate, then put the cards back. The clerk is quite good at this, but then one day he is replaced by someone who cannot multiply, who can just read instructions. Instead of multiplying the figures, this clerk takes out other cards on which there are multiples printed. The second clerk’s process may be a step longer, but he is 10 times faster than the old one. He is efficient. Eventually this second clerk is replaced by a third, another dumber but quicker chap. So it goes until all the new hire can do is distinguish ones and zeros.
So technology is quick. We no longer have to know how to navigate (unless you consider getting your friends lost while “navigating” from the passenger seat), need a great memory or feel the need to multiply. We have technology to do these things for us. One problem arising from this is that we can be lulled into ignorance and can lose potentially lifesaving intelligence by outsourcing it.
I didn’t just throw around “potentially lifesaving” to be grandiose; ignorance really can be dangerous. One need only investigate the current state of airline pilots to ascertain that pilots have become, in practice, system managers in the business of maintenance. Besides crucial points at a plane’s takeoff and landing, a pilot’s job isn’t necessarily very strenuous or interesting; most of the navigation and piloting is done by the machine itself. Minimizing the amount of work humans do seems to be a trend of technological development, but each job should be approached differently. People sometimes forget that technology can fail -- and what failing means isn’t always no Wi-Fi; sometimes it’s death.
The Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash in 2009 is one poignant manifestation of technologically induced ignorance and mechanical failing. The two pilots of this plane were cruising in autopilot when they failed to follow the “sterile cockpit” rule, a regulation that talk in the cockpit after the plane has dropped below ten thousand feet can only be about the flight. This understandably proved to be difficult, but also deadly, when Flight 3407 began to plummet downward, its airspeed unmonitored.
This tragedy speaks to the diminution of human talent and attention, and the dangers of relying on high-stakes but fallible machines too faithfully. As technology continues to replace human activity, it is important to know what factors reduce the risk of future calamity like Flight 3407. For example, maybe in the future autopilot should randomly give out, or maybe Candy Crush should randomly tell me to go pick up a book.
