The Sensors

My baby takes the morning train
He works from nine till five, and then
He takes another home again
To find me waitin’ for him

(Popular song by Sheena Easton, 1980)

The other day, I was thinking of words from the above long-ago song. For many of us, commuting to work – by car, by train, or by bus – is a rather unremarkable experience – so routine that our commuting days tend to blur into each other. If I had to say something different about this morning’s commute from the one of a week ago – I will be hard pressed. Most commuters live routine lives. Like the song describes, we stumble out of bed, rush through the familiar routine trying to squeeze minutes wherever we can. The idea is to get to work quickly and when the day’s job is done – the daily bit of flesh repaid – to head back equally quickly to the warm embrace of loved ones we likely spent the day dreaming of – and to our other commitments in life.

Yet, it is not all that simple.

What got me thinking about the whole experience was the metro accident that occurred in our area recently. While the cause of the June 22, 2009 accident on the Washington, DC Red Line remains under investigation, a likely suspect could be the metro’s computer-controlled speed adjustment system for its trains and the interaction between the operator and the trains.

That system was carefully designed – so much so that it had often been called fool-proof. The computers supposedly control everything. They are supposedly monitoring the distance between adjacent trains and – if getting too close, they supposedly apply brakes before the train has any chance of bumping into its next buddy.

The system is supposed to stop the train right into its tracks. It is supposed to prevent catastrophe.

Except that, in this case, it did not – the only time it mattered – at least for those who were killed. We will perhaps never know how often it had previously come close to catastrophe – without anybody being the wiser.

Don’t get me wrong – there IS an operator present in there. You in fact hear him (or her) announce the station names and they are the ones who open and close the doors for you. And they are the ones who are supposed to stay in ultimate control of the situation and prevent catastrophes. They are supposed to watch out for another train no matter what the computer says – and to manually override the system if needed – before somebody gets hurt.

However in this case, it did not happen. There may have been a blind turn somewhere along the tracks so the next train (which had stopped) would not be visible. The operator kept relying on the guidance system which likely gave it the “all clear” signal and by the time she likely saw the other train – it would have been too late and braking would not have done much good.

Had there been no guidance system – would she have gone past that bend at such a high speed?

I don’t think so. I cannot predict what she would have done – but common sense tells me that when you drive past a blind turn, you slow down for you know not what lies ahead.

It turns out – the machine apparently does not either!

Yet, because we have such unmitigated faith in the infallibility of the machine we suspend our own little judgments – and we suspend our power to override the machine – which is in turn overridden by our faith in the infallibility of what we don’t even fully understand.

The machine – it gets its sensory information from little gadgets – little sensors. The sensors are supposedly hardy but they can indeed degrade over time (the harsh climate extremes of old DC do not help) and they can indeed fail – especially after years of incessant service. So, in effect, the guidance system can become the human equivalent of a blind person except that – unlike the blind human – it does not know its own handicap and keeps telling all those who rely on it…

“Go on! No problem! Trust me!”

The ultimate case of the naturally blind leading the ever so willing blind by choice – which must result in disaster sooner or later!

We have gained speed, we have gained efficiency – but we have lost the only thing that is unique to us, we have lost the human touch.

The human touch – the slowest little component of this incredibly fast and complex machine – and the only one whose performance cannot be predicted because our standardized tests lose all their meaning on the human sample!

For in case of this sample, every specimen is different. Every bit of it is absolutely unpredictable. It is full of sensors – not a few sensors like in the case of the machine – but millions of sensors most of which we don’t understand.

Yet, it is those little sensors which light that little red light somewhere inside us.

When we see a person around our neighborhood who does not look “right”, a sensor in there somewhere “rings a bell”!

When we converse with somebody and note a hesitation on the part of the one who is telling us something – the sensor makes a “light go on”!

The bell tells us something and the light tells us something. The bell tells us that the suspicious person could be suspicious for a reason and we cannot ignore the bell’s sound except at our own peril. The light tells us that what the other man is NOT telling us is perhaps even more important than what he is telling and so you better pay attention to what that could be.

The sensor alerts us of the wariness we notice in others – the wariness that tells us that not everything is as it should be.

It is the unexpected pause – that little shifting of eyes – the apparently trivial variation from the expected which gets our attention.

It is the primordial fear of what may be totally unknown having infiltrated the ranks of the known and trusted!

It is the ability to hear the silence and anticipate a storm which could follow – the silence no machine can discern because machines do not hear the silence – only humans do! That silence before the storm!

And the sensor is the only part of the whole which is not dead – unlike the case of that super-sensitive machine – that machine so sensitive that in theory it can read differences of microscales in microseconds!

Yes, its sensitivity is far greater than the human’s.

Yet it is so, so dead!

The human is so error prone so often – but human errors are random. And when we err, we get upset. We are filled with anguish – we get mad. We kick ourselves! We fume. We curse!

The machine does no such things. It makes no random errors. There is nothing random about the machine. It goes about everything in its systematic, very algorithmic way. It runs its life per algorithms. It runs our lives per algorithms.

It ruins our lives per algorithms. Because it even errs in systematic ways.

And it is not choosy about who it kills in the process.

It kills military generals – it kills mortgage bankers.

It kills Bible school teachers.

It kills single moms balancing work and children

It kills aspiring beauticians.

It kills those who work for nurses – and it kills aspiring nurses.

It kills forty-year old ladies who work two jobs because that is the only way to support five children.

The machine kills folks who have no control – and it also kills those who are supposedly in control of the machine.

It changes the working stiffs into real stiffs – so fire Sgt. Holmes’ rescue dog Cuzo only sniffs and fails to bark – which he is trained to do only when it finds someone alive.

It traps young women under mangled metal so all they have to hold on to during the dying last minutes of life are occasional touches of well-meaning firefighters who have not the time to hold the hand.

It makes places “really, really quiet.”

But the machine feels no guilt. It has no compunction. The tears of the loved ones don’t sway it, the pains of the innocent victims move it not one bit, the agony of those who eat the poisoned fruits of its errors – it does not affect it at all.

Nothing moves the machine. It is too big to be moved. It only knows its instructions – be they right or wrong! The machine does not care about right or wrong – it only follows what its own sensors tell it to do.

The machine does not care and when we – the humans – stop caring too, we become like it.

And the only time we fail miserably is when we tune out our own little sensors and let the machine rule over us.

We use man-made machines day in and day out – without a moment’s pause, without the least of thoughts. And if catastrophe does occur, we only think of whether it affects our own immediate plans – will it take more commute time for me tomorrow?

Little cogs in the complex machine are all we are – even though one may think of oneself as a big wheel – in reality; one only knows one’s own little functions. Too insignificant to see the larger picture! And too absorbed in that own little world to think of the possibility that not all babies will make it home some day from that routine daily commute.

And that baby could be held by somebody close by – even by you!

(Dedicated to the memory of victims of the June 22, 2009 metro Red Line accident in the Washington, DC area. Accident and rescue operation details are based on accounts published in the Washington Post.)