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In Tech We Trust
Yesterday I had a very close call, and it was because I trusted technology. Here's the situation, I had just left work and was walking towards my bus stop when I reached an intersection. I saw that the light was red so I stopped, and as I am prone to do I was almost instantly lost in thought. I am at times a bit of an absent minded professor... Except that I'm not a professor. Regardless, when I looked up I saw that the walk signal was on so I started across the intersection, and was narrowly missed by a speeding cab! Instantly I was furious at him, I couldn't beleive he would run light that was fully.... GREEN?!? Just as I noticed that the light was both green for him and a walk signal for me, his light changed to amber, and then to red. At that exact moment the walk signal turned to a red hand. I watched the signal for another light cycle, and sure enough it had somehow become inversed, it always said "walk" when it meant, "stay the hell where you are", and it always said "stand there like an idiot" when it meant "go ahead and cross, it's all good".
Now, as a nerd I have a very strong love / hate relationship with technology. I have been around technology for so long, so intimate with it, that I have come to know and respect both its strengths and its flaws, and like in many relationships, I suppose that I had started to take it for granted. But yesterday made me realize how dangerous that blind trust can be. One malfunctioning circuit, one crossed wire, one light bulb! One light bulb being turned on instead of another and my life was almost extinguished.
With robots like the Qrio and Honda's Asimo, more and more automation in the workplace, as well as the fact that we are very close to being able to fly commercial flights without pilots, we are rapidly reaching the point where our trust in technology almost exceeds our trust in each other. In many ways I can see why that is. While a machine may malfunction, the machine itself is not malicious in its intent. While a robotic pilot may shut down and crash a plane, it would never deliberately fly that plane into a building to make a political statement. It's a strange balance, many machines evolve out of our distrust of each other, and in turn they end up requiring us to trust each other even more.
Take, for example, online credit card processing. Online shopping has become a somewhat common occurence. Amazon.com, Ebay, EBGames, and many other sites all have code designed to securely process your credit card tansactions. These systems evolved out of our fear of things like identity theft and credit card fraud. So we place our trust in these companies and in the programmers who are employed by them. But even the companies themselves only have the assurance of their programming team that these systems are actually secure.
I think what it boils down to is that with any new technology we need to examine the level of human interoperability, really. How much supervision do our robotic employees need? Are we really doing ourselves a service by removing ourselves from the equation? I think wht we need is a tighter integration between man and machine, that's why I find articles, like this one about a video game controlled by human brainwaves, to be so fascinating.
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