Catching Up

Technological advances always seem to catch us flat-footed.

Historically, we tend to out-kick our coverage where technology is concerned. The replicating pattern doesn’t vary: A new innovation is introduced; it is beyond anything that came before, and until it and its implications are fully understood, bad consequences occur. People lose property, livelihoods, even lives.

We killed an awful lot of people and horses with automobiles before the technology evolved, and until we established safe rules of the road. Likewise, we could fly airplanes long before reliability and safety protocols caught up with the technology.

If you’re of a certain age, you remember the unpredictable, but semi-regular occurrences of air disasters. (If you share my wife’s appreciation of the macabre, the Smithsonian Channel is for you: they’ve made a regular meal of plane crashes, the gorier the better). The current—and remarkable by-any-standards—safety record of American-flagged air carriers (no fatalities in the fifteen years since 2009) is due almost exclusively to advances in materials and software.

Pilots grouse about becoming MIS-slaves (management of information systems), but the numbers don’t lie. While hands-on flying is becoming a thing of the past, I still like my pilots to be high-time with graying temples. When everything fails, I want experience and calm at the controls. The point is, when we understand new tech, we learn to control it, and implement it safely.

The Boeing 737 MAX is the exception that proves the rule. In an exercise of “regulatory-capture” leading to gross corner-cutting, the manufacturer didn’t bother to completely document a change in stall recovery software, nor did it alert airlines to a new software “fix.” Manuals should have been supplemented, and pilots retrained, but that would have been expensive, and thus margin-crushing. The result was the Ethiopian Air and Lion Air disasters five months apart that killed 346 people, leaving us with the deadly reminder that technology is a double-edged sword: It can save you, but it can also kill you.

In the 1930s, when “the wireless” (AM radio transmission) was invented and radios bloomed in every living room, propagandists had a field day. The most infamous of the bunch, ordained priest Father Charles Coughlin, a virulent isolationist and antisemite, was spewing pro-Nazi propaganda on the American airwaves to millions of people every Sunday night. It took until 1941 and the FCC’s Mayflower Doctrine to, according to Wikipedia, "provide full and equal opportunity for the presentation to the public all sides of public issues."

It's easy to get ahead of ourselves.  

Now we find ourselves trying to catch up to the unpredicted, devastating impact of social media, particularly among young people. Smartphones are finally being stored for the school day in some middle- and high-schools. That’s a trend that will sweep public schools next fall.

These revolutionary devices which are gateways to the sum-total of human knowledge, have also enabled social media platforms where small interpersonal problems are blown up until they are school-wide controversies. It’s like giving a toddler a loaded handgun with a hair-trigger.

Bullying and suicide are on the rise. Deepfake naked bodies are adorned with real students’ faces. You can imagine that every insecurity an eighth-grader has about their social status, their hair, their body, and their clothes, are blown way out of proportion.

Social media is also having a devastating effect on the national conversation. Most people don’t understand that TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and the rest prosper through emotional engagement. The madder you get, the more likely you are to post that anger, encouraging more people to respond. The more engagement, the more money the platform makes, meaning technology companies have no incentive to regulate discourse.

Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, United States Surgeon General, has produced a damning report and an admonition to get your kids off of social media. Parents would do well to listen.

Here’s one of his colleagues: “The digital world wasn’t built with children’s healthy mental development in mind.”– Sandy Chung, M.D., FAAP, President, American Academy of Pediatrics.

Once you’re out of high school, there is no principal to take your phone at the door and return it at the end of the day. Adults who live on social media are doing so without guard rails, and while not great, it’s still better than having ‘tweens and teens on their phones during the school day.

Guru investor, Warren Buffett, recently said that we have more to fear from AI than to gain from it. At this moment, he is correct. As illustrated above, new technologies always get the jump on us. That’s because until technologies mature and society has a lot of experience with them, the implications live in a black box. Unintended consequences are associated with every technical revolution.

I don’t doubt we will catch up. I just wonder what will be left of us when we do.

©2024 Jon Sinton