We want our technology to be user-friendly. Don't we? Or isn't that implying that we are content not to know how things work — in fact, that we want to be protected from knowing how things work?
"It used to be that, in addition to a dipstick, you had also a very crude interface, simpler but no different conceptually from the sophisticated interface of the new Mercedes. It was called an “idiot light.” One can be sure that the current system is not referred to in the Mercedes owner's manual as the “idiot system,” as the harsh judgment carried by that term no longer makes any sense to us. By some inscrutable cultural logic, idiocy gets recast as something desirable."
Matthew B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. p. 62.
Maybe we don't want to know how machines work because we don't want responsibility for what they do.
"In an earlier study, you found that people thought an autonomous vehicle should protect the greater number of people, even if that meant sacrificing its passengers. But they also said they wouldn’t buy an autonomous car programmed to act this way. What does this tell us?
Azim Shariff: People recognize it is more ethically responsible to save more lives. But people are self-interested, and it might be a hard sell to do what’s ethical. When Mercedes-Benz said that if they could only save one person, they would save the driver and not the pedestrian, public outrage made them retract that statement. This demonstrates an interesting dilemma for car companies. If you say your car would preference the passenger, there will be public outrage. If you decide to treat all life equally but imperil the life of the person who bought the car, you might actually take a hit to your bottom line, people might not buy that car. From the manufacturers we’ve talked to, they want the decision taken out of their hands and they want regulation."
“How should self-driving cars choose who not to kill?” Morgan Meaker. Feb. 15, 2019.
Perhaps we're influenced by television, which shows us an endless stream of parts, so we don't learn how to tell ourselves a broader narrative and see the whole.
"Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ‘breaking’ until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean."
Timothy Snyder. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017. p. 60.
As we forget how things work, we also forget how to distinguish between cultural myths and decide what reality to believe in.
"Uniformity leads to forgetfulness. That’s why some observers call TV a ‘forgetting machine,’ because it puts everything on the same level. Even fiction and reality increasingly tend to blend there. And that's not just true for children."
Jean-Claude Carriere, asking an interview question to The Dalai Lama. “Between Exile and the Kingdom," February 1993. Violence and Compassion. New York: Image, 1994. p. 163.
But there are some machines the planet would really be better off without.
"A 10-year Certificate of Entitlement – a license people in the wealthy city state [of Singapore] must purchase before they are even allowed to buy a vehicle – now costs a record minimum of $76,000 (104,000 Singapore dollars), more than four times what it did in 2020, according to Land Transport Authority figures."
In this city, the right to own a car starts at $76,000. And that doesn’t include the car, Heather Chen, CNN, October 5, 2023
Clackety-clackety-bing! photo by Art Hupy, c. 1965 © Creative Commons. University of Washington Libraries, Digital Collections. Flickr.
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