My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #50, December 17, 2000

MECHANICAL FIX

Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.
Pink Floyd

So, it seems, the Supreme Court has declared machines superior to humans. It is better, they say, to trust the machines that DIDN'T count the votes than the unreliable, contradictory human beings who WOULD count them. (How do we pronounce the word f-a-i-l-u-r-e, children? Success!) Presumably that's because the people doing the counting would not be objective, would read dimples as votes because they wanted them to be votes.

I can't say it surprised me, because Americans don't seem to trust human beings very much anymore. Give us a complex, human problem, and instead of studying the situation and sitting down to think it through together, you can count on us to come up with a simple, uniform mechanical solution.

Outraged by judges who exercise their discretion and occasionally set violent felons free, we have replaced their fallible, human judgment with strict sentencing guidelines, the tougher the better. "Three strikes, you're out," sounded pretty good to most Americans when it was first proposed. It doesn't sound anywhere near as good now that we've realized it's being applied to ANY felony, no matter how petty, and sending people to prison for life without parole for stealing a bicycle or a slice of pizza.

Might our (theoretically) innocent children encounter dirty pictures on the Internet, or worse, pedophiles in chat rooms? We just require schools and libraries to install filters on every computer to screen out nasty, sleazy stuff. Do the filter-mongers ever bother to investigate whether the filters actually work, or what else gets screened out along the way? Nope. Does it ever occur to them that teachers and librarians, who understand children's needs and have been selecting good, age-appropriate material for children for well over a hundred years, might be trusted to guide children through the net and choose high-quality educational resources for them? Of course not.

Are we frightened beyond reason by school shootings? Our solution is to install security cameras throughout the buildings, remove lockers, and have the students enter the building through the same sort of x-ray machines used in airports to look for weapons and bombs. Has it occurred to anybody to wonder how students are supposed to be less alienated when the schools they're required by law to attend start looking and feeling like prisons?

Are we dissatisfied with the quality of education our students are getting? Do we distrust the subjective grades teachers give their students? Our solution is to measure student performance with "objective," machine-gradable tests, and to tell the teachers their jobs depend on their students' scores. Does anybody worry that teaching subject matter will become secondary to teaching test-taking skills? Does anybody worry about whether the tests in fact measure what they say they're measuring? Not the politicians, and not the people who want to undermine public education so that all that lovely money can either be given back to taxpayers or diverted into private and religious schools where there's none of this nonsense about educating ALL children equally.

Indeed, if you look at the history of public schools since World War II, you see a remarkable preference for machines over teachers. First it was educational television that was going to raise the level of instruction and broaden children's minds. Since the same programs could be broadcast into every classroom, all our children, rich and poor alike, could learn the same things. Teachers would become adjuncts, turning on the TV sets, helping the children fill in worksheets where they would review what they had learned. In fact, if Chris Whittle would outfit the school with satellite dishes and TV sets in every classroom on the simple condition that all students would be required to watch his program every day, why, you hardly even needed teachers to work out their own lesson plans and curriculum anymore.

Of course, when the Internet came along, every school needed T-1 lines and an Internet connection and masses of computers . They needed to hire techies to keep the machines in good repair, too. That cut into the money available for teachers, counselors, and art and music programs, but that was OK, because the Internet was going to make our kids sophisticated and computer-literate -- all we'd need teachers for would be guides along the information highway. Does anybody ask what educational results we might have gotten if that same amount of money had been spent on more and better-paid teachers, more library books, and new buildings? Not the politicians.

What we're seeing here is a willingness to trust and spend money on machines, not people, and an intense desire for a uniformity of outcome. Naturally you can't expect to get that from quirky, stubborn, arbitrary, compassionate, ingenious human beings. Ray Kroc, the man who taught us to love uniform hamburgers with two pickle slices each, no more, no less, wrote in a memo, "We cannot trust some people who are non-conformist. The organization cannot trust the indiviual, the individual must trust the organization."

You would think that we trust machines, or something. If so, that's something new in our history. Our folk songs celebrate humans over machines -- "before I'd let that steam drill beat me down, I'd die with a hammer in my hand." We cheered for Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, not for the speeding production line he served, that stamped out one identical widget after another.

Why do we hate Bill Gates? Because his arrogant programs think they know more than we do about what we want to accomplish, and arbitrarily change our fonts, underline our URLs, and tell us when we type our names that we've misspelled them. We love the whole idea of open-source code and peronalizable software because they allow us to tinker with programs and compel them to do what WE want them to do, not what THEY think we should do.

Stop to think for a moment about what we say we value in America: our uniqueness, not our sameness. We don't want to become regimented, uniform, cookie-cutter people, but heroic, risk-taking individuals. We believe that individuals are supposed to change history, not just fit into it. We honor excellence, not mediocrity.

We cherish our diversity, not uniformity, and speak a language that blends English with Yiddish shtick, Irish slang, and bits of German, Italian, Spanish, and black English. American cuisine is pizza and eggrolls and curry and Kentucky fried chicken. Our music blends the traditions of Africa, Scotland, Mexico, and Appalachia, the here-and-now concerns of folk music and the heaven-seeking joyousness of gospel.

So, why, all of a sudden, have we decided we prefer the predictability and uniformity of mechanical solutions? Are we afraid people will make mistakes? But our favorite myths and legends are about people who make mistakes and learn from them -- Thomas Edison persevering by finding hundreds of ways a lightbulb would NOT work, men who drive one company into bankruptcy and came back and build new empires.

Is it maybe that simple, all-encompassing solutions start looking better when we're frightened? That the world is changing too fast around us, and our futures are no longer secure? Fear and anger go hand in hand with authoritarian attempts to punish, to clamp down, to reassert control.

Or maybe it's not people we distrust, but YOUNG people? Other people's children, who defy us, who violate our sense of decency with their body piercing and green hair and visible underwear, who assault our ears with boomboxes blasting loud, ugly music adults find incomprehensible, who play unspeakably gory video games, who do drugs and sex, who seem to have so much more freedom than we ever had, who seem to understand and control this new computer-chip world better than we do?

I wonder if we might, in fact, be just a little jealous of the people who will displace us?

I don't know the answers. I rarely do. But I do know that when our solutions aren't working, the first step is to ask the right questions. And my other question is this: what makes us think that, once we've turned control over to machines, we can ever take it back again?