If you have read my posts you should be familiar with my style, which I like to think of as an appropriate blend of truth, sarcasm & cynicism, with a sprinkle of humor. It’s the folks who aren’t familiar with my style for which I write the following:
Let me be abundantly clear. There is no curse of machinery. There is no curse of technology. We are being cynical when we use those terms.
As Henry Hazlitt brilliantly explained, technological progress is a basic goal of society. A cursory understanding of real economic theory is all we need to understand that progress benefits all.
Yet as we sit in the year 2015, a full forty-six years after man was (supposedly) put on the moon, we still live in a society where human “engineers” are in control of trains?! What? For real?! How is that possible? We just saw a tragic accident where an Amtrak train derailed and killed multiple people. The “engineer” in charge of the train was going 2x the speed he should have been when he hit a turn that caused the train to derail.
Do you know how many times a computer makes that mistake? Zero. Literally zero times.
How can we still allow human error to be such a negative factor in our lives? Society seems to shun technological progress for fear that allowing computers to control trains would put train drivers out of work, hence the fear of “the curse of machinery”.
This is belief is a harmful fallacy that can be explained and dismissed in just a few minutes . Do yourself a favor and watch the video. Be smarter than you were a few minutes ago.
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