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Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Can technology defeat Evil?


    I was watching the rerun of the 60-minutes episode on the future of "Driver-less Automobiles"
recently and the horrible thought occurred to me that this might be a terrorists best-friend.  With this invention they could have suicide-bomber-vehicles MINUS the suicide-bomber.   A new age in efficient killing machines could be implemented in which they would no longer have to spend countless months/weeks indoctrinating and convincing poor idiots that they are better off sending themselves off into the next life than living in this one.   Now they would only need to purchase a fleet of Google-Cars,  load them with explosives, program their final destination through a Google-map App and then send them out on their merry way to wherever you need them to go.  New York Madison avenue?   A random government building.   A school.  A county fair.  An airport.  You could even send it into places a normal person would not be able to get into since there is no driver that guards would pull out their guns and shoot to stop.

    Of course some will say, we will figure out a technological solution to these problems.  But all those solutions are meaningless as they disregard an unchangeable truth:  

                                                         EVIL ALWAYS FINDS A WAY!

    And I am not just talking about ISIS levels of evil either. I am also talking about simple day-to-day issues as well. Take for example the issue of texting-while-driving.   I have seen several "solutions" to prevent this from happening, but each solution I see I only see more dangerous ways around the "fix".   One company envisions cars using sound-wave technology from the cars speakers to "locate" where in the car the texting is taking place and if its from the drivers location, it would disable the phone.   Sounds simple doesn't it?  But all the person needs to do to work around the issue is simply hold the phone away from them in the area of the passenger seat thereby fooling the phone into thinking its being used by the passenger.   This not only works around the fix, but now puts the driver in a more dangerous position than before because now his direction is completely off the road and facing the passenger side window.   Some would say, "No one is going to do that!" but they don't understand (or just don't want to admit) how "evil/sinful" we humans can be.

    As for ISIS terrorists they take their evil to all new levels and no "solution" you might propose will fix this problem.   Any software fix will be over-ridden by a hack.   Any method to disable the car will be turned off.   Any detection method will be cloaked.

    Does this mean we should never have driver-less cars?

    My answer is a full 100%  YES.

    In my opinion, there are only 2 forces in our society driving this "driver-less car" (sorry for the pun) technology.

              1) Laziness
              2) Greed

     Most technology is built on these two forces.   We don't want to scrub clothes clean, so we built clothes-washers.   We don't want to chop down trees so we invent chainsaws.  We don't want to look at a map so we get directions from Siri. The list goes on and on.   Now we are too lazy to drive our own cars.   We would rather spend our time reading our Facebook posts or checking out Twitter or texting a family member.   To many, driving is SUCH a hassle.   Yes we could take the train, subway or bus, but those methods are too noisy, too difficult and they are not on OUR schedule and we have to spend too much of our time waiting for them to arrive.   Secondly, greed factors in as companies want to increase their profits.  Many companies find that removing humans from the equation is the fastest way to do that.  Imagine Google teaming up with Uber and how they could supply taxi services without the taxi-drivers.   So long Uber drivers!  You have been replaced with someone who will work for even cheaper than you.  A computer.

    But we have good historical company when it comes to techno-destruction.   Rome was taken
down as well because of their reliance on technology.   Of course it wasn't computers, but it was something just as necessary to them.  Their aqueducts supplied millions of gallons of water every day to a city of over 1 million people.   Those aqueducts were the life-blood of the city and without it they would not last more than a month.  They found this out 537 when the Goths destroyed several key aqueducts leading into Rome and it was only a matter of days for Rome to surrender.  

    Will we learn from their folly?  Probably not.   Greed and Laziness are too tempting to pass up for most people.   We will continue to put our heads in the sand and say that some smart people out there will find a solution to these problems.  Only problem is the other side has equally smart people working on solutions to our solutions and unlike our people, they are not limited by laws or marketing (if a solution makes a product too hard to use we will often discard the solution) like we are.   Their only concern will be how many people they can kill at a single time.

   Maybe we just have to say that technology has its limits and on the balance of good vs evil some advances are just not worth having.

 



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