Put Down the Damn Cell Phone

There is a big push to build self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. This push is technology driven, but it is not the technology of the cars or the artificial intelligence or the sensors that make it work. No. What is driving this is the technology of hand-held electronic devices: Cell phones, I-pods, tablets, and the like. It is the inability of people to put these devices down when logic dictates that you should not be looking at them. Like for example, when you are driving, or walking across the street, or operating heavy equipment. Common sense would seem to indicate that these are potentially hazardous activities and perhaps it might be better to hold off on answering that text message instead of responding to it this very minute.

But people are stupid. I say this with some authority. Just read the paper every day. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if the stupid people just killed or maimed themselves, but how many innocent people have died because of the actions of the stupid? So, since we can’t get people to put down their devices, we have to come up with a whole new technology to accommodate them. Hence the push for autonomous self-driving vehicles. Perhaps Human psychology has not kept up with human technology. We haven’t figured out how to shape the proper behavior. Psychology gets applied to things like marketing. Maybe there should be a whole new branch devoted to putting the damn cell phone down (but where is the money in that?)

It seems like we are headed down a bad road. I think technology is great, I love my computer, my cell phone, my tablet. But I see younger and younger kids being given cell phones and tablets, or just plopped in front of the TV. Such devices are addictive to an adult, imagine how more addictive it can be when it is all you have known your entire life. Overexposure of kids to electronic devices has been linked to obesity, sleeplessness, behavioral problems, educational problems, etc. When I see a two year-old being handed a tablet to keep him entertained, that is tantamount to child abuse. Perhaps in such cases the child needs to be taken away and given to an autonomous self-driving parental device.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an e-book through Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Star Liner

Comments

The Trip Home

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and

That 70's Decade

Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things that ha

Tyranny of the Masses

I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local level t

A speculative mind

Search This Blog