Techno-Exegesis

by Joseph Battaglia  (sephail@2600.com)

...or maybe not.

Maybe new technology isn't such a good thing.  Perhaps we've reached a point where the desire to incorporate it into every aspect of our lives has begun to take precedence over the goal of what it is we're trying to replace.

It's not like there's been any lack of concern over the matter, especially lately.

Search any news aggregating service for the terms [+voting +machine +fraud] and you'll see what I'm talking about.  What about [+passport +cracked] or ["red light" +camera]?

I'm not referring to dried-out passports whose covers have succumb to old age, or the little LED that indicates your latest burglary attempts have been captured on two slowly-rotating reels of magnetic tape (although these are surely problems to some).  I'm talking about the excessive use of technology.

Five years ago there was no such thing as intercepting the communications between an immigration control computer and your passport, and ten years ago you weren't likely to get an automated ticket in the mail because you entered an intersection behind that Big-Ass SUV which entirely blocked your view of the traffic light as it changed from green to red.  And it's not like this stuff is helping anything.

The RFID "feature" of a passport is, as far as I'm concerned, entirely useless.

It creates an unnecessary security risk and contributes nothing to the speed at which immigration lines progress.  The current system uses Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) as the agent swipes the bottom portion of your passport.  It's fast, relatively reliable, perfectly suitable for the application, and it's even secure (so long as the passport remains in your possession).

But we're rapidly progressing to the point where anyone can sneak up behind you with a specially-designed RFID reader stuffed in their crotch, brush up against your tuckus, and suck the digital fingerprints and photographs of you and your kids straight out of your ass-pocket.  No shit.  And every time this stuff is demonstrated, officials shrug it off as overly paranoid.  They don't understand the technology, yet are responsible for making all of the decisions regarding its use.

What about the red light cameras?

Surely some entity besides the capitalizing municipality and associated police officers (who have dutifully acquired extended donut breaks as a result of the reduced workload) stands to benefit from them.  They've got to be making our streets safer, since that's the only official reason generally given for their existence.

But even this is disputed, as The Washington Post has discovered upon investigation of red light cameras installed in Washington, D.C.  In fact, accidents have more than doubled in some locations, and there are even lawsuits claiming that municipalities have changed light timings to increase violations!

What is clear is that accidents are increasing in many locations (and that there's about $100 missing from my checking account).  A simple solution comes to mind: remove the damn cameras and just delay the perpendicular green light by a few seconds.

The T-bone crashes that they're looking to prevent would surely be reduced without the added side-effect of increased rear-end collisions.  It's unfortunate that such a choice between safety and income never leans in our favor.

The grandmaster of all failing technological implementations these days seems to be the voting machine.  Ah, the voting machine...

Few of us can even remember when the activities of voting and using a machine were two entirely separate processes.  Voting used to entail marking your favorite candidates onto a sheet of paper to have it later counted by the King's Men, who could not be trusted.

Now the vote counters have been replaced with elaborate mechanical and electrical contraptions, which can not be trusted.  Corrupt poll workers, loose gears, broken levers, and even hanging chads were no match for the commotion stirred up by the poor design of the modern electronic voting machine.

The documentary Hacking Democracy conveys this very well; you've got to watch it.

Not only does it demonstrate how access to the most widely-handled component of these machines can be used to skew elections, but it even sheds some doubt as to whether or not the public willingly elected some of the lesser-evolved members of our species into some of the most critical positions in our social hierarchy.  Not that I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything...

Not everybody is so eager to replace everything with the latest and greatest gadgets, however.  Take pilots, for instance.

When planning flights, many pilots use an E6B (or similar) flight computer.  It's a computer in the most rudimentary sense of the term, essentially a special-purpose slide rule.

In fact, it's the only field in which slide rules are still in widespread use.  Why?  Because they're fast, reliable, and when you're thousands of feet above the ground flying an aircraft you don't care to be fumbling with an electronic calculator: replacing dead batteries, trying to work around that stuck key, or wondering whether or not the LCD would still be intact after sitting on it, if only you'd started that diet a few months earlier.

There are other added benefits, too.

The concepts of significant digits and keeping track of exponents are generally lost amongst today's TI-89-touting youth.  Slide rules require that you consider these things, often allowing you to catch mistakes long before you would while using a calculator.

Look, I'm not anti-technology.  Really.  I practically immerse my entire life in it.

It just seems obvious that some things aren't quite ready for prime time yet, and premature deployment may actually have the potential for some devastating consequences.

The examples I used here are simply those that have either received a bunch of press coverage or that I have personal experience with.  I threw in the slide rule rant for good measure (no pun intended), but the concepts they demonstrate are well-suited to the notion that there are some scenarios where old technology just works better.

There are plenty more I could have chosen along the same lines, some with more severe ramifications and some which are much more trivial.

Either way, it usually seems to be the younger generation who are just as closed-minded to using more traditional technology as your grandmother is toward the advent of e-mail.

Whether it's ending up with a corrupt democracy, rampant identity theft, higher accident rates, or a broken calculator when you need that quick altitude-correction calculation, we definitely need to take a good hard look at the benefits and drawbacks of making the switch to the latest-and-greatest.