Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

One of the ironies of our age is that even as we begin to untangle the incredible complexity of our own biology, and learn to repair our bodies at the level of individual genes, we become increasingly accepting that the complex systems we've created to run our artificial world are beyond our understanding.

Back when we were a largely agrarian society, and machines were isolated islands of human technology in a primarily natural world, familiarity with the machines of the day was commonplace. Now that the majority of us live in artificial urban environments where we are surrounded by machines, a vanishingly small percentage of us possess more than a vague idea of how those machines work.

Only a couple of generations ago, a man was expected to be the master of any machine he might use. The ability to change a tire, or adjust the spark advance, was as much a part of driving an early car as knowing how to start the engine. Today we're increasingly surrounded by "black boxes" that are outside of the typical user's ability to understand, let alone fix when they break down.

We've adopted a largely "unit replacement" philosophy in response to the increasing complexity of our technology base. Instead of trying to fix a malfunctioning carburetor ourselves, we replace the entire carburetor as a unit. If a single chip fails on a computer motherboard, we replace the entire board rather than spend hours with a logic probe and thick books of data sheets trying to figure out which chip is actually broken. We tell ourselves we don't have to know how something works if we can deal with it as a black box unit. We increasingly depend on specialists to manufacture and repair the growing numbers of black boxes that populate our daily lives.

Unit replacement seems to make economic sense as long as there are more black box replacements on hand. Of course, the concept quickly breaks down when the supply of replacements is depleted. A single point of failure in a minor part can compromise an entire complex system, if the failed part is in a unit for which replacement units are no longer available, and fixing that single point of failure is beyond the ability of the repairman.

While early machines were routinely patched and repaired over generations of use, today we routinely abandon otherwise functional machines when supplies of replacement parts start to run out. Many of us have come to assume that parts will no longer be available for a machine that is more than a couple of years old. And the period during which we expect a product to be maintainable is growing shorter.

Even when parts can still be found, specialized knowledge and skills are still required in order to accomplish a repair. The accelerating rate of change that feeds our addiction for new - and sometimes even improved - distractions, also creates conditions that discourage the sort of comfortable familiarity that was the hallmark of the journeyman mechanic.

The journeyman tradition of learning the nuances of a certain kind of machine over years of hands-on apprenticeship, becomes an exercise in futility when the magnitude of change between product cycles makes yesterday's knowledge obsolete and irrelevant faster than it can be learned. No one is an expert when everyone has to start over from the beginning with each new technology cycle.

But even as the likelihood declines that today's self-styled "expert" actually knows enough about what he's doing to fix anything more than the most obvious of problems, the scarcity of individuals willing to even try fix the black boxes of today, supports a growing back log of customers willing to pay dingy repair shops hourly rates that rival those of walnut paneled law firms, for similarly uncertain outcomes.

As the fabled feats of the larger-than-life master repairman of yore fade into mythology, our expectations that a black box that once blinked its lights, and pretended to do our bidding, can be restored to its previous state, fade as well. When the year old black box that answered the phone, or filled our eyes and ears with the youthful performances of artists that long ago died of old age, fails to respond to our limited repertoire of diagnostic techniques (repeatedly turning it on and off, followed by a series of progressively less tender "taps" on the case), many of us just automatically assume that the ability to repair such an ancient machine is already a lost art. It's easier to just buy a new toaster or VCR than to find someone who can fix the old one.

Designing for maintainability adds costs and manufacturing difficulties. Anything that can be later dissembled for repair or maintenance, must first be assembled out of separate parts during manufacture. As consumers give up on the idea of extending the operational lifetimes of their possessions by repairing them, manufacturers are eagerly abandoning the added costs of making their products repairable.

More and more of the products of modern industry are being designed as sealed boxes with no accommodation for being opened for replacement of individual units or components. Of course, it's hardly surprising that manufacturers are more than willing to save a couple bucks in manufacturing - especially when at the same time they can ensure that their customers will have to buy an entire new product if even the smallest part breaks in their "old" one.

The ability to fix "old stuff" has become an arcane skill practiced by an ever shrinking number of holdovers from an earlier age. And as the ability to fix things gets ever more distant from the skill sets of the common man, the increasingly rare ability to open a black box and fiddle with the innards takes on the mystique of magic among the expanding ranks of the technology intimidated.

Alas, exceptional skills are not guaranteed to be an advantage. A distressingly consistent aspect of human nature is the tendency of those lacking a useful skill to first envy those possessing it, and eventually come to fear what they are unable to understand. If they are unable to dominate and control what they lack themselves, the fearful tend to attack the source of their often irrational fears.

It's an easy step from an individual's inability to figure out how to program his VCR, to an expectation that other systems on which he depends are similarly beyond society's ability to understand and repair. It has become an accepted aspect of modern life that our much ballyhooed information age is being built on the shifting sands of unstable technology. Comedians get knowing laughs from audiences that are all too willing to believe that computers always crash at the worst possible moment. The "blue screen of death" and Ctrl-Alt-Del have become cultural icons, and major system crashes at Ebay or Amazon.com make the evening news.

The general lack of confidence in the computers that run our high tech civilization, was perhaps best demonstrated by the eager expectation that the Y2K bug would trigger a cascade of failures building up to an end-of-the-world catastrophe. Seemingly credible experts predicted with all sincerity that the Y2K bug would leave the streets strewn with bodies, and modern civilization a fading memory for the survivors.

The hysteria over the expected Y2K disaster probably came as close to driving people over the brink in mindless panic as the Cuban Missile crisis. A particularly disturbing aspect of the public's response to the Y2K bug was the ready acceptance that the best minds of today would be unable to fix the "lost technology of the ancients", and rescue our modern world from looming disaster.

The predicted Y2K disaster turned out to be the great nonevent of the century. But was it all over-hyped hysteria? Or did we dodge the bullet this time because of the widespread awareness of the problem well before its trigger date, and the billions of dollars business and government spent in pre-emptive fixes - including training thousands of new computer repairmen in the ancient arts of Cobol programming?

It's unlikely that the Y2K fizzle was the only conceptual flaw in the increasingly complex and interconnected infrastructure of our modern technology dependent world. NASA recently crashed two billion dollar spacecraft on Mars. One crashed because the specialists working on the project knew so little about the black boxes other specialists were contributing to the project, that they overlooked the minor technicality that they weren't all using the same units of measurement.

We spent more billions littering the surface of Mars with high tech junk when the landing jets prematurely shut off on another spacecraft just minutes away from a successful landing. It turned out that the technicians building the black box to shut down the landing jets when the spacecraft touched down on the planet surface, hadn't understood that the black box another team of specialists were building to deploy the landing gear in preparation for landing, would cause a jolt that would be misinterpreted as the actual landing by their touchdown sensor.

It didn't matter that every other system on those spacecraft worked perfectly. The single point of failure the builders had overlooked doomed the entire effort to disaster.

We continue to build ever more complex systems even as we tell ourselves we no longer need to understand the components out of which we're building them. The commercial software industry continues to pursue the elusive promise of object oriented programming (OOP), in spite of the performance inefficiency that is the unavoidable result of the fundamental concept. The irresistible attraction of OOP - at least to the management of software companies - is its promise of replacing expensive expert programmers who have to understand every line of code they write, with minimally skilled production line workers who assemble software products out of reusable black box objects, without any need to understand of how those objects work.

And our arrogant ignorance isn't limited to forgetting the foundations of our technology. The recent election was a sad spectacle of how completely we've forgotten the basic principles on which our nation was founded, and which made our unprecedented prosperity possible. The Electoral College served its intended purpose of balancing political power in our constitutional republic between the coastal urban population centers, and the less populated states. But instead of acknowledging its actual role in the process, the College was denounced by the arrogantly ignorant as an archaic obstruction to the will of the people. Unable to understand the long tragic history of populist democracy, the arrogantly ignorant rail against the checks and balances that frustrate their desire to repeat the mistakes of the past, totally missing the point that they are the danger from which we are being protected.

One would think that the world's premier capitalist/materialist society would at least understand money. But even the basic concepts of accounting and simple money management are becoming black boxes beyond the understanding of the average citizen. It's estimated that 50% of adult Americans lack the basic math skills to balance a checkbook. Small wonder the basic functions of our economy have become such a black box mystery to so many voters.

Only the most mathematically challenged should be capable of believing that a system of accounting, based on the total corruption of even the most basic accounting principles, can produce anything but intentionally manipulative lies and distortions. The way our government keeps track of the money it has taken from us, and borrowed against our good names and property, is nothing short of legalized fraud, embezzlement, and outright theft. A citizen who tried to employ a similar contempt for basic arithmetic and economic logic in his own financial affairs would be facing jail time.

And yet the majority of Americans appear all too willing to believe in a "budget surplus" that is composed almost entirely of funds embezzled from "off budget" trust funds. They're even willing to believe that the national debt is being paid down, when in reality it's just being shuffled into less publicly visible debt instruments. And because their arrogant ignorance of the intentional deceits built into the black box of government accounting allows the unknowing to believe that a "surplus" exists, it also allows them believe that the imaginary surplus should be spent on whatever ill-conceived feel-good programs dishonest politicians have concocted to buy the undeserved gratitude of the incompetent.

Unfortunately, even the most aggressive ignorance of reality can't make reality cease to exist. The blissful denial of reality that has become such a prominent part of America's political landscape, can only temporarily conceal the inconvenient facts that the imaginary easy money we squander so freely today, and the individual freedoms we surrender to the false promises of populist demagogues, are debts that will eventually bankrupt and enslave our once free and prosperous nation.

The flaws in the black boxes on which our modern world depends are still flaws no matter how careful we are to avoid knowing about them. The Y2K bug could well have fulfilled its most dire prophesies if someone who still understood that particular black box hadn't raised the alarm in time to fix it. Who will warn us about the flaws in the black boxes that run our fragile artificial civilization when no one remembers how they work?