Do you remember that saying of St Paul’s? “The good things I want to do I don’t do. But the things I don’t want to do; I find myself doing”?
Well, that quotation came to mind a couple of months ago when I read that a driverless Uber car had hit and killed a woman cyclist in Arizona. The car actually had a driver who was not looking ahead at the time, but the car was in automatic drive mode when it hit the cyclist.
Obviously the accident was not planned nor did anyone want it to happen.
In fact, the reasoning behind automatic cars is a belief that technology will reduce accidents. Yet here we are with a situation whereby, like St Paul, we can see that a belief in good intentions does not somehow work out in practice.
At the time of reading about the accident I wondered if the belief behind the purpose of the technology was based on an accurate understanding of human nature. This question was quickly answered the next day by a letter in the Daily Telegraph, in which a reader from Cheltenham noted that a lesson discovered by the airline industry 60 years ago might now need to be learned by the auto industry. The lesson being that whilst humans are very good at controlling vehicles and try hard to avoid accidents, computers on the other hand are excellent at monitoring and never get bored.
The writer then goes on to say that if we, “Reverse these roles we quickly see that humans get bored when reduced to a monitoring role but that computers do not mind killing themselves.” And so it make sense to let humans to do the things we are good at, but let the machines do the boring stuff.
I don’t expect the desire to change the world will stop because of this accident, but I do hope that those who champion ‘Technological change’ will take note that ‘Belief’ always lies behind any change initiated by humans, and so they had better be extra careful to make sure that their own beliefs are properly grounded in an accurate and true understanding of human nature.
The same, of course, goes for those politicians who somehow believe that if everyone thought like them and lived in nice houses and had lots of money then crime and nastiness would disappear and peace would reign supreme.
For the time being however we still have to live with all those well-meaning ‘experts’ who believe that we, the public, are not able to think for ourselves, and so spend their lives dreaming up new ways to keep us safe or prevent us doing or saying anything of which they do not themselves approve.
It was against this backdrop that my spirits were raised in joy when a recent report said something to the effect that a glass of red wine a day would add years to our lives. That joy was however tempered a few days later when another report by a different bunch of experts said that more than six small glasses a week reduced life expectancy dramatically.
It took only a few days before my heart was lifted again when, during a coffee at The Feathers in Ledbury, I read the following letter from a Times reader who was not an expert in anything except maybe, an expert in noticing that experts never agree amongst themselves and yet always expect us to agree with them.
Dear Sir,
After reading your report that drinking 2 glasses of wine a day shortens life by 2 years, I did a quick calculation of my life expectancy based on the latest alcohol guidelines and concluded that I had died several years ago.
Yours faithfully. Rupert Godfrey. Weatherby. Yorks.
View from the Pew 