Another Form of the Human Factor (Blog #5)

Kim Vicente has this theme of the human factor which you can also see in David Nye's Technology Matters. David Nye mentions B.A. Turner, who wrote Man-Made Disasters, when discussing how one small thing leads to another which can build up and cause a disaster. He writes, "No single mistake is usually the cause of a disaster, which rather comes about through an unforeseen interaction of several small miscalculations or errors" (Technology Matters, 164). David Nye is saying that there is usually this build up of errors that happens which causes a disaster; it isnt just one wrong flip of the switch. I think that Vicente would agree with this but add on several small "human" miscalculations or errors. David Nye does not seem to be putting a blame on anyone in particular but Kim Vicente does. Vicente has this notion of the human factor which is the problem; the human factor being that the technology may work perfect but if the human running it does not exactly everything they are doing, something can go wrong. Nye somewhat approaches this conclusion with bringing in human intervention but he does not go as far as give the blame to humans. Nye looks at it as more of an "unforeseen interaction of several small miscalculation or errors." However Nye does start to talk about human intervention and how it has caused problems, such as spraying DDT to kill malarial mosquitoes when instead it gave way to a DDT resistant mosquitoe which lead to more outbreaks. In my opinion this is another form of the "human factor" that Vicente is talking about. The intervention of humans has caused these techonologies to become deadly.


Just a thought: On page 167 of Technology Matters, David Nye poses the question, "Do weapons make people safer?" He goes on to talk about owning guns, he says that in countries where you cannot own a gun homicide and accident rates are much lower than in the United States. He really brings it home with, "In states with more guns, more children are dying." This got me thinking, why are we allowed to own guns? Why is it in the Constitution that the second amendment is the right to bear arms? What were our Founding Fathers thinking? Did they foresee this becoming such a problem? Now I understand that there are people who hunt and all that jazz but still this is a huge problem. Too many people die because of guns, or is it just the people that use them, not the guns? If so do you think that if we outlawed guns, we would see more people killing with knives or some other sort of weapon or do you think that we would see homicides and accident rates decrease?