Blame Your Mistakes on Technology

Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."

Comments

personal responsibility

[froggero1]

it's much easier to blame someone/something else than take personal responsibility for your actions. Is this really a surprise to anyone?

Re:personal responsibility

[Blue Stone]

I think it's just the Milgram's Experiment effect in operation; an authority telling a person what to do, and that person submitting to that percieved authrority, even in defiance of their own eyes, ears and conscience, and doing what they're told.

In this case the percieved authority is a little electronic box.

Common Sense

[ATAMAH]

Technology is a supplement, it is not meant to replace common sense.

Re:Common Sense

[Opportunist]

Really? It seems that in the vicinity of a computer, common sense takes a break for a cigarette. Or how do you explain why people fall for scams and "click this now or something horrible happens" virus/trojan/worm mails?

Re:Common Sense

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

Technology cannot replace something which was never there in the first place.

Just more whining?

[mkcmkc]

Our city's newspaper had one of those "call for action" articles last week, in which a local resident was complaining about a ticket he got. Why was he complaining? Because he was pulled up behind a semi truck at a stop light, and went through the light after it turned red, because he couldn't see it (i.e., because he was tailgating the truck). His complaint was that it was all the fault of the traffic light, which was mounted too low. Idiots like this shouldn't be allowed to operate power tools, let alone drive cars.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that we have an innate ability to shift blame. No "technology" is required. (Or rather, maybe blame shifting is a technology.)

Unthinking obedience to the technical gizmo

[Space cowboy]

I have a friend whose partner was driving down a motorway (equivalent to a freeway) in Britain. Unlike California where lanes are de-facto equivalent, in the UK it's customary to have faster lanes towards the "outside" (more to the right) of the road; she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.

Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.

She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).

There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...

In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.

Simon.

A friend's daughter...

[Spy der Mann]

once tripped onto a chair (she was around 3 years old) and hurt her knee.
After crying a lot... she yelled: "TUPID CHAIR!" and kicked the chair.

Somehow by reading the article summary this scene came to my mind.

Re:Blame

[rossifer]

Nowadays there are things gun maufacturers [sic] can do to make it hard for anyone other than the owner to use the gun.

Just a few thoughts. All of those "things" that gun makers can add to the gun also make it harder for the owner to use the gun.

Trigger lock? There's a key, somewhere around here... (there's actually a whole host of issues around these keys: five year olds understand locks and keys, so either they're with you or they're available to the kids.) I earnestly hope I don't have to figure out how to silently remove a trigger lock in the dark while an intruder is in the hall between me and my children.

Magic ring that enables the electronic trigger? Hope the battery didn't die (in the ring and/or in the gun), hope the gunpowder residue and the cleaning fluid from the last time I was at the range didn't corrode or short out the circuitry. Hope the electronic components are able to handle the shock of firing the gun as durably as a mechanical trigger (unlikely, but possible).

Personally, I like gun safes and pistol vaults. The pistol vault I like the best is the one with the touch combination that with a little practice, is very simple to get right, even in the dark, even under stress. Still an extra step, but it's a mighty small obstacle to me and a much bigger obstacle to the kids or to a thief (assuming I installed the pistol vault correctly and they can't just take the whole thing).

Back to the point: there's nothing the gun manufacturer can do to the gun to make it harder for someone else to shoot that doesn't also make it less reliable or less available to me. But there are ways for gun owners to responsibly keep firearms, which leads the discussion to where the responsibility really lies: with the gun owner. If a kid takes one of my guns and accidentally kills another kid, I'm going to feel responsible for the tragedy. So I do what I can to minimize the chances of that happening while still keeping responsibility for my own self defense. And IMHO, that's how it should be.

Regards,
Ross

Re:The trouble with your argument is

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The woman that won against mcdonalds suffered severe burns (more than you'd get from normal coffee) and sued for medical costs (they'd settled hundreds of times for the same issue). The jury fined them one day's coffee sales, as a symbolic way of punishing mcdonalds. This about was later reduced by the judge. All told, this isn't a frivolous suit.

Re:Obligatory

[iocat]

This reminds me driving from Chicago with a fellow nerd who was obsessed with our GPS and his PC-based map software. At point he was like "I'm hungry" and I was like "me too, let's go to burger king" and he was like "[looking at his PC] there's none around here." and I was like "uh yeah there is" and he was like "no, I'm looking at the computer and there a no burger kings around here anywhere" and I was like "well, I'm looking out the windshield and I see one," and he was like "oh."

When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."