Anything perfect in your life?
Do you have anything in your life that is both complex and works perfectly? Any piece of equipment or software? Or any social organization, like at work or in your community?
I don’t. I have a lot of things that work well in my life, some things that work very well. But nothing is perfect. And the more complex, the less likely to be perfect.
Here is why I am asking. Google is involved in two things that are deeply inconsistent, and at least one of which asks us to trust our lives to their ability to develop something that is highly complex and is perfect, or near perfect. I am referring to the “driverless car.”
At the same time that they are asking us to rely upon their ability to turn out this perfectly safe product, they have just screwed up my smart phone.
Screwing up my phone
I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which I have had for more than a year, and which I like a lot. Recently, I was required to download the next version of the Android operating system that the Note 3 runs on. This is Android 5.0 or “Lollipop.”
Immediately, I started having problems with the phone. My email wouldn’t send sometimes. It took forever for my email list to come up. My battery life has diminished substantially. Random apps start when I was doing something else entirely, like disengaging from my calendar, and the phone would pop up. Some apps simply didn’t work. Apps would not remember their default status, like my calendar remembering that I like it in “week” mode. Widgets would disappear, only to reappear after I had restarted the phone.
When I called my service, AT&T, the nice woman heard my complaint, and asked me what kind of phone I had. When I said “A Note 3,” she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” Is there anything I can do about this, I asked. “No. There will probably be a fix come out soon.” Do you have any information on how long “soon” will be? “No. There does not seem to be anything planned.”
Great! So, you make me upgrade (a misnomer) and then the “upgrade” is a pain in the butt, and then you tell me, well, you may just have to live with that.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor irritation. And the quintessential rich white person problem. I have, in fact, checked my privilege.
From the same people who brought you a screwed up phone. . .
But at the same time that Google’s imperfection has screwed up my phone, they want us to buy a car that drives itself. Really? You can’t get my phone to work well, and you want me to trust your car will work just fine? Because, if the driverless car works as well as my phone, we are in for some huge problems.
Yes, I know that I am not a perfect driver. Nor are the rest of you, who insist upon using the same roads as I. But moving to driverless cars will probably not be an improvement, just a transition from the screw-ups human drivers make to the screw-ups that computer coders make.
When I first heard that people were going to start selling driverless cars, my reaction was one of incredulity. Doesn’t everybody have as many examples of imperfection in their lives as I do in mine? (See my posting on imperfectibility, http://tinyurl.com/n79d6os, and the two-part posting on the limits of measurement, http://tinyurl.com/mku4cnv and http://tinyurl.com/kf4dywp.) Who really believes that a bunch of geeky, socially isolated twenty-somethings living in the unreality of Silicon Valley are, no matter how smart they might be, likely to produce something, like a driverless car, which by its nature has got to be really, really close to perfect?
Sooner or later, I am sure that the Google guys will figure out how to make my phone work better. They’re not incompetent. But neither are they perfect.
So, I ask you again. Am I the only one with abundant evidence in my life that things that human beings do are never going to be perfect, and that the more complex they are, the less close to perfect they will be? And, if I am not, then why are we even thinking about letting Google and others put driverless cars on our roads?
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