1865 Red Flag Act

When we are presented with new technology we look for all of the things that can go wrong and try to engineer to protect everyone from all of the bad things that could happen. The idea of having someone walk in front of a motor car to warn drivers of horse-driven coaches was very sensible. I wasn't alive at the time so maybe I am not in a position to judge either way but I can't help thinking that we might have much fewer road related fatalaties and serious injury if we had only continued with this practice. Wouldn't that be sensible?

The post of Miguel Guhlin titled Institutionalizing Fear reminds me of this in many ways. Filtering technology will become more sophisticated and we will become more skilled with driving these wretched things and soon it will be all different.

In a couple of years we will be saying things like - 'Remember when schools got plugged into the internet and .........."