An extended ComEd outage has my district back in the Stone Age. The network, the internet and the phone system are down. The intercom, the electronic door access system, the security system, and Open Time Clock are down. The environmental system is down, the magnetic locks that control the fire doors have released, and even the modern toilets we installed are controlled by electronic sensors and cannot function. Our world of dazzling tech convenience is truly a delicate one.
I once listened to a Unitarian minister deliver a sermon on technology where they argued technology was not improving the quality of our lives and cited an example as the push button phone (this was in the late 80’s). They argued that push button phones might save a few seconds when dialing a phone number compared to a rotary dial, but it isn’t like anyone is experiencing zen bliss during those three extra seconds. It occurred to me then that they had quite missed the point. Push button phones serve to increase productivity, not improve one’s inner experience.
It could be argued that increasing productivity can, in fact, lead to improved quality of existence. The introduction of domestic labor saving appliances, such as washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners, dish washers etc. would seem to have improved a lot of people’s quality of life throughout the 20th century.
Ha! I’d like him to spend a week in our ultra modern school with all of its conveniences and then sit one day in the shadow that was my office with NONE of those conveniences. He’d be singing a different tune. LOL
So far that is one of the most short sighted and ridiculous statements ever made but, if we truly do destroy our own civilization at some point, wouldn’t “human improvement” end? Maybe he will end up being right after all.
Imagine if there was a major CME (flare) on the side of the sun facing us that caused thousands of satellites to just fail. Without GPS, people would have to use their brains to figure how where they are and how to get where they want to be. It seems likely that the country would be full of lost and disoriented people. And facebook could not inform you of your friends’ locations.
It’s a friend, but a somewhat flakey one, so don’t rely on it completely. I worry about the trend towards removing natural gas solely because there were multiple winters were electricity was out for days.
There’s a school of thought that all technology is essentially neutral until it is used with either a positive or negative purpose. Atomic energy is a good example - the discovery of fission meant we could both generate power and create bombs. We then made our choices.
I’d say electronics are largely used for good, but not always. When we make it so toilets, which don’t really need electronics to perform their basic function, dependent on them… that’s rather stupid in my view. Same for towel dispensers and a number of other basic appliances that don’t really benefit from fancy electronics or connectivity.
So basically, it’s on us. We’ve made some foolish choices about how to apply the tech we have. I don’t blame the tech itself.
Yeah, it appears as though reactor construction was approved as long as there would be some good bomb stuff they could pull out of the waste. One of the earliest operating reactors at INL had its controls shut off and it went cold all on its own, but no, we had to build the other kind that melt down if the control systems fail and produce waste that is a bitch to deal with. Apparently because the safe designs that extract more W/kg out of the fuel were not suitable for defense applications.
I don’t want to bog us down in that example, but I think a lot of the early history of nuclear technology was driven by the time period. I’d never really thought of it before, but suppose the various key moments in physics (Leo Szilard conceiving of fission, James Chadwick discovering the neutron, etc) had not happened to occur during the lead-up to WWII?
Certainly, the potential and push for weapons would have been there regardless. But I wonder if the power generation side might have had a better chance of maturing earlier at a more peaceful period in history?
The other key example we get from nuclear technology is that it was bound to happen. The United States embarked on the Manhattan Project largely because the relevant scientists realized if they could discover fission, so could their German and Japanese counterparts. So it was going to be developed whether we liked it or not, and once again, the question becomes how should we use it?
To bring it all together, I’ll say I support limitations on both nuclear weapons and electronic gadgetry applied to toilets.
But there are definite advantages to electronic towel dispensers:
hygene – no touch required. With older ones, you had to press a lever to dispense towels, a lever others had touched just after using the toilet.
lower maintenance – janitors used to have to clean that dispensing lever often, because everyone touched it.
less wasted resources – it was common for people to press the lever repeatedly, extracting many paper towels, way more than they needed. Wasteful (and expensive for the business). It’s hard to do that with electronic dispensers.
These are offset slightly by the loss of function during electrical failures (though most have a manual wheel you can use when power is off) – but really, electrical failure are pretty infrequent and short-term in the USA.
In general, technology tends to be a friend for the individual user, but often a foe for all of us collectively, mainly in terms of unintended consequences. The smartphone, social media, millions of vehicles and massive power plants powered by fossil fuels are some examples that come to mind – each one of them a benefit to us individually, giving us unprecedented communications, mobility, and power, and all of them in one way or another degrading our well-being collectively. It’s basically another manifestation of the “tragedy of the commons” – we’re very good at building things that are attractive to the individual, but, especially in capitalist societies, very bad at managing the collective impacts of the things we build.
The ones I recently used provided all of those advantages without electronics. There was 3" of paper towel hanging down, you grab it and pull the towel out, it cuts it off and leaves 3" of the next one hanging down. Sometimes the high-tech solution has a simple, elegant alternative that works at least as well.
