MUSINGS The tech trap

The tech trap


Technology is prising action and consequence further apart

The Circling Fin
Fin Keegan

Working in the news business in Las Vegas, as I did for several years, led me into some strange encounters, from a bear hug with David Hasselhoff to poetry chat with President Jimmy Carter. However, one of the most haunting experiences I had occurred on the morning a group of fighter pilots in crisp, sand-coloured uniforms came in for interviews from a nearby airbase.
Nothing so odd about that – except for the bizarre fact that these airmen spent their working days waging war within an hour’s drive of our studio. Many US Air Force personnel do battle now by remote-controlling unmanned aircraft – drones – over territory a dozen time-zones away. These courteous, spick-and-span warriors could deal death to distant enemies on a day framed by a visit to the gym, softball with the kids, and a pick-me-up coffee at the drive-thru.
Beyond drones, there are countless examples of the human tendency to shield ourselves from the fully-felt reality of our actions. In fact, recent developments in the automobile industry should give us pause too.
Great advances have been made in road safety over the years, as manufacturers met consumer demand for safety features. But the revolution wrought by airbags and dashboard computers has spelt disaster for pedestrians. As driver and passenger fatalities have fallen worldwide, more pedestrians have been killed. Why? The upshot of safety technology has been that drivers are so cocooned in their climate-controlled, surround-sound, GSM-connected pod they are no longer fully conscious of their speed.
In the 1970s, when your Fiat 124 reached 50 miles an hour you really knew about it, probably because your teeth, along with everything else, were chattering furiously. Now you could be cruising at twice that speed and find yourself irritated at a slight waver in the radio reception.
I didn’t attend last year’s Geneva Motor Show (too busy waxing my Lamborghini) but there was one encouraging development: Volvo’s V40, boasting sensors on the bonnet which, upon impact, unleash an airbag for pedestrians. It sounds, on the face of it, a crazy idea but it does at least show that carmakers are thinking through the social consequences of their innovations. The people ‘out there’, even if they exist for us only as dots on a monitor or patterns through our windscreen, have lives and feelings and rights just as we do.
Swiss writer Max Frisch once observed that “technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not have to experience it.” We should embroider these words around our every screen and mousepad.

Fin Keegan is a writer based in Westport. This column is based on his weekly radio essay, heard on WRFM and CRC radio, and online at thecirclingfin.com.