AT: “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” asked novelist Thomas Pynchon all the way back in 1984, the year, according to George Orwell’s prediction, that we’d all be living in a technologically advanced dystopian hell. At the time, the digital revolution was just taking off, the personal computer only a few years away from reality.
Pynchon questioned if the advent of the P.C. would be opposed by those who took after the Luddites of old – literary and intellectual humanists. During the Industrial Revolution, the European intelligentsia fretted over the effect things like textile machines and the steam engine would have on manual labor. This concern was wound into the works of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, who warned of technological progress gone awry.
Then the electronic word processor came along and shut the snooty intellectuals up. “Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead,” Pynchon lamented. The Luddite mindset looked defeated at the hands of a few college dropouts tinkering in their garages.
Fast-forward almost three and a half decades, and Pynchon may think differently. Two recent events have muddled our understanding of technological innovation, clouding and confusing what we thought we knew about the promise of advancement.
The first was the implosion of every techie’s dream: the self-driving car. An auto-piloted Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian near Phoenix, Arizona. At the time of the accident, the vehicle, a Volvo SUV, was in a state of full mechanical autonomy; the driver behind the wheel was there only for emergencies. An emergency did occur, as Elaine Herzberg attempted to cross the road at night. The car’s lights didn’t spot her in time. The brakes failed to kick in. Herzberg lost her life on the darkened street.
This was no human error. The Associated Press consulted two experts, who found that the SUV should have sensed Herzberg before the collision. “The victim did not come out of nowhere. She’s moving on a dark road, but it’s an open road, so Lidar (laser) and radar should have detected and classified her,” explained law professor Bryant Walker Smith.
Researcher Sam Abuelsmaid concurred, pointing out that the car’s detection system “absolutely should have been able to pick her up.” The word “absolutely” is apropos – we’ve been conditioned to expect tech to operate perfectly as planned, yet we find ourselves disappointed when the copier gets jammed for the thousandth time. read more
1984 I was a senior, and told my bud Computers would ruin mankind by taking people away from the real nature of life. He disagreed completly, and said I was Nuckin Futs, he’s an Engineer today.
I’ve heard the tech guys explain how much superior over human senses, these self driving cars are. But you know what these little Terminator cars can’t do? Anticipate.
Technology is great when used right. I can’t imagine life without my smartphone or computer.
This is why I am sticking with my flip phone.
I understand the phones. I don’t understand why people turn them into wallets and home computers. By the time you realize you’ve lost your phone, somebody in Madagascar is using your bank account to buy prayer rugs for a whole village.
And looking at all your photos. You know, the one with you and the secretary…
How about the “Cloud”. Am I putting my shit up on the cloud? Oh hell no.
“This was no human error.” I call bullsh*t!
All mechanical failures are human in origin. ALL OF THEM!!!
If you think it through, you will realize that in order for a machine to fail, somebody, somewhere, failed to do their job correctly. Could have been the metallurgist who specified the alloys, or the foundry that made them. Perhaps it was the machinist who milled the part, or the mechanic who installed or serviced it. The gal who designed the algorithm, or the guy who wrote the code. Maybe it was the driver/pilot/captain who operated it incorrectly, but ultimately ALL mechanical failures are human in origin!
As an aviator for the last four decades or so, I can tell you that no aircraft has ever just decided to crash and kill people!
It is the very same reason why it is beyond asinine to blame the gun for committing violence.
FWIW – Uber disabled the Volvo’s built-in emergency crash avoidance technology. So the blame is NOT on the car, but on the Uber uber-egotists.
Mr and Mrs. Really Enraged – very happy Luddites, who no longer even have a cell phone now.
I’m in a strange position. I work on technology daily but am a Luddite in the sense that I don’t trust it, knowing it can fail at the most inopportune time.
@Chance March 29, 2018 at 12:14 am
> All mechanical failures are human in origin. ALL OF THEM!!!
But, this wasn’t a “mechanical” failure. The “autonomous” industry is twenty-second century voodoo. “Machine learning” is NOT engineering. The entire point is that no human understands what the machine is learning. And the humans who “explain” to you how the machines are “learning” are lying. (Some humans might understand the how. They are the type of mental freaks that don’t think like “human beings” — so, no they can’t, really, explain even the “how” to “mere mortals.) Some “engineers” design some adaptive control system, and they “turn it loose” to see what it does. If it does something they can get paid for, the ritual is considered a success. But the only way to “fix” a failure is to alter the ritual, and see what happens. That’s not science (no “scare” quotes). That’s not engineering. That’s sorcery (but it seems to pay well).
Use tech as you see fit, just don’t let it overcome you, simple and works for us.
“This was no human error.”
WRONG!
She stepped in front of a moving car! That was an error.
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
At one time gunpowder spelled the end of humanity.
At another it was dynamite.
Rifling.
The bolt-action rifle.
Breech-loading cannon.
Semi-automatic rifle.
Automatic weapons.
Socrates thought that writing would destroy memory.
Movable type was gonna infect the world with unacceptable thought.
The translated Bible.
Nuclear fission.
Nuclear fusion.
The laser (more appropriately – LASER).
The U-Boat.
Napoleonic-style warfare made war too horrible to imagine.
WW I was the “War to End All Wars.”
We improvise. We perfect (to whatever degree is possible). We innovate. We improve. We tweak.
Most of us understand that in a collision between a 2000 lb vehicle and a 120 lb human, the human will lose. Don’t need to understand mass, momentum, and kinetic energy equations, for that.
No matter our technological “progress” we really haven’t changed much from the stone-age barbarians dancing and barking strange phrases in front of a fire.
Check out the vids of Ferguson – people called by their phones to rampage the town. Gathered by the icons of technology to stone the Police.
The future is always hidden in murk – as is most of the present.
izlamo delenda est …
Is this about the Amish?
“SMART” phones – the ULTIMATE technological oxymoron. Because they certainly make their users, DUMBER than box full of them. 🙄
Self-driving cars are technological onanism – best done off the public roads.
Not to worry. We’ll all soon be dead from the cellphone radiation.