No fear

I think I'm a bit late jumping into the "fear tactics" discussion following Monday night's debates, but I've been pondering how the discussion ended up so weighted in fear. Specifically I'm thinking about fear of technological advancement (as opposed to fear of falling children or lack of medical help).

I don't recall that our debate points as envisioned included fear of technology (I was in the Statement #1, Against group), but we wanted to touch on the impersonally or possible "coldness" of transacting with technology as opposed to humans, where technology may not be able to quickly adapt to the more subtle cues that human shoppers give off. And, we wanted to emphasize the impact of technology-gone-wrong on human beings: frustration, lack of immediate or satisfying recourse. But, interestingly, we ended up spontaneously characterizing these interactions as scary, or threatening. Why is that? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I think I can see where the leap came from. I think that examples of technology-gone-wrong, along with a lack of understanding of how technology works and what to do when it breaks, can escalate to fear (or at least this is a societal assumption). At their core, movies like Minority Report or I, Robot are about what happens when technology behaves unexpectedly and people no longer have control over it. You can find more than a few Twilight Zone episodes from the '60's on this theme as well.

But, as someone (or several people) in class mentioned, the biggest technical adaptations we make as a society are more-or-less painless because they are gradual. For most of his life, my grandfather never would have considered banking with an automated teller, but their numbers have grown and grown and their benefits are so obvious that it has become far more difficult to transact in the non-automated way. I think this is a great example of how the adaptation of good technology takes place. Perhaps another good example is the telephone: From huge machines anchored to your wall, to smaller machines anchored to various walls, to handsets disconnected from walls, to entire phones not even remotely near a wall.

As a separate point, I really enjoyed the debate format of the discussion. I don't know much about debating and I think I learned a great deal about format and tactics from the awesome groups that presented. (Since I couldn't put it on my form, I thought the best debate was made by the Statement #1, For team. They did a great job with the format, and in particular I thought their point-by-point rebuttal was effective.) I'm not sure I see the value of a pre-written rebuttal deck and thought the best rebuttals were tied to the original points made by the opposition. Anyway, it was a good learning experience.