First they came for....

    Recently I was in comment-section at work on an article dealing with the future of the Automated-Car.   I had made the comment that I believe the "force" behind this technology is not the consumer, but the heads of corporations.  I say this because you hear very little support from your average person.   Google has tried automated taxis for sometime now and there has been very little increase in their usage.  The idea of letting go of the wheel and letting a computer do the driving is still unnerving for a lot of people (me included).   Our guts tell us that the world is a very complicated place and no programmer could think of every possible scenario. 

    This is why I said in my comment, "This is coming from corporations wanting to get rid of delivery jobs like truckers and home-delivery-drivers".   Another person from my work replied that these jobs will eventually go away but other jobs will take their place.  He ended it with "we should not worry about this".

    Of course he can say that...he's not a truck driver.  Tell that to a person is over the age of 40 and has 20-25 years left to work that he needs to change careers.   Look him in the face and tell him it's all for the better because now he can buy his stuff from Walmart even cheaper!   But what does he buy all that Walmart crap with???  His tears??

    My reply to him was that it's easy for us to say that... we are not truck-drivers.   But engineers have a target on their backs as well but don't want to face it.   I have written before how Moore's Law is shifting it's methods to achieve its goals.  For those of you not acquainted with it, it goes like this: The COST of the transistor will be cut in HALF every 2 YEARS.   In the past, we have had the luxury of a silicon process system where we could make transistors 50% smaller every 2 years (ie - double the number of transistors on a chip).   Year after year we grew the number of transistors on the chip and added more and more functionality.   Everything else could stay the same and our costs would be cut in half and Moore's Law kept marching on.  But now today, that is not possible.  Transistors are getting TOO SMALL and it's taking 4+ years (AND GROWING) to improve the silicon processes. 

    In order to keep the law going, focus is not on the transistor, but on those who put the transistors together to make new products; the engineers.  Some of this has been done by standardizing our designs.  By turning parts of the design into small "LEGO blocks" we can reuse them over and over again ( motto: design once and use many ).   But now the attention is focusing on the validation process.   What if I can write a specification in a way that a computer can read it and create validation content to verify it works or not?   I can get rid of teams of validation engineers. 

   Artificial Intelligence is the engineers "automated truck".   If you think it's too complicated you are wrong.   If I can have AI read medical documents and kick out cancer-treatment-recommendations I can surely have it read a design spec and kick out design-verification-tests.  What's really crazy is it's engineers who are putting these systems together.   It reminds me of a famous episode of the 1950's TV series "The Twilight Zone" in which a factory manager keeps automating more and more of his factory until all that is left is him.  Then on the final scene the board replaces the manager with a robot too.  We are designing our own replacements as we speak.

We should all pay heed to the old poem, "First they came for the socialists"

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Maybe a 21st century version would be

First they came for the Bank-Tellers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Bank-Teller.

Then they came for the Checkout-Clerks, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Checkout-Clerk.

Then they came for the Truck-Drivers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Truck-Driver.

Then they came for the Engineers—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Dealing with our "faults"

   In computers, errors are a constant source of problems.  Almost every part of a computer tries to detect and even fix errors as they occur.  Your hard-drive stores a value called a checksum on every 4K byte sector and whenever that sector is read, a checksum is computed and compared to the value stored.   If there is a mismatch, the computer might try to re-read the sector again to fix the error.  Your computer memory can have Error-Code-Correcting bits stored to not only detect a bit flip (0 becomes 1 or a 1 becomes 0) it can actually determine which bit is wrong and fix it on the fly.  When your computer sends or receives data over the internet, its data is checked and re-checked along the way to make sure it arrives unchanged from the source.

   But there is one place in a computer where errors are hard to detect and fix.  That place is the microprocessor.  Often referred to as the "brains" of the computer it can't see where it's going wrong. If it adds 1+1 and gets 3, then it will always add and get the same number.  The only way for it to detect a fault is to compare itself to another CPU running the same code in parallel with the idea that having two-heads is better than one.  But even if it does see a mismatch with the other CPU, it can't determine who is wrong and who is right.

   We as humans are like these microprocessors.  We know we are not perfect and we look to find someone to compare our lives to in order to stay on track.  It might be a sports figure like Tom Brady or a Hollywood actor like John Wayne.   But these people are as faulty as we are and we are always disappointed in the end. 

   In Psalm 19:12, King David writes:

   "Who can discern his errors?
    Forgive my hidden faults"

    I remember when a friend of mine suffered a mental breakdown from the struggles of life.  I had not seen him in many years and he came back to our company to work with us.  We could tell something was wrong with him and at first just ignored it.   After a few weeks though it became very apparent to all that he was not right in his head.  He was sending out long winded emails to various people about things that had nothing to do with work.  He wasn't coming into work but was working from home.  My boss sent me to go talk to him and see what was wrong.   I went to his place and it was like a scene out of the movies "A Beautiful Mind".  The walls of his apartment were covered with newspaper and magazine articles and the floor was cluttered with empty bottles of Coke and boxes of pizza and Chinese food.  I tried to get through to him that he needed help but he was convinced he was fine and in need of no help.  He was sure that everything was going to be fine once he solved this problem he was working on for our company.

  Our brains, like my friends, are so fouled up with sin we cannot even see our own faults.  We may even think that certain qualities we have are "good"  when in fact they are "bad" for us.   We have hidden our faults so well we can't even see them anymore.   But God does see them and he has pity on us.

   Jesus said to the crowds below him as he hung on the cross

  "Father!  Forgive them for they know not what they are doing!"

He was not just saying that to the Pharisees that had come to witness his death, but also about us as well.   We think we know so much these days and are convinced that it's GOD that has it all wrong and not us.   We are fine and everything will be better once we fix these few problems we have.

  So where are we left?   Who do we compare ourselves to?  How do we make sure we don't go too far away from where we should be?

Jesus has the answer:

 "I am the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE.  

   No one comes to the Father except by me"

I highlight the word TRUTH here because he is who we are supposed to be.  He is the benchmark.  Of course we can never measure up and he knows that.  That is why he credits our lives with his righteousness and atones for us.