Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We just cannot resist applying the latest technology to something.

This is the second in my series on the “Technology Imperative.” (I have learned that there are books and papers with this title elsewhere.) The first part in the “series” was blogged in the year 2010. Oooops, not much continuity, but here goes.

Our American government scans faces at border entry points to find imposters, those folks whose desire to enter America leads them to break the rules. We find this story of how 23 million faces were scanned in 2020. All this technology resulted in the arrest of, well, uh, er—nobody.

One could claim that this is a tremendous success as the use of this technology prevented anyone from attempting entry. One could claim that this was a big waste of money since no one was trying to enter. I guess there is no end to how others could claim other things.

Nevertheless, the technology exists, so we must use it. That is the technology imperative. There appears to be no end to very expensive examples of this. Sigh. What can we say about ourselves? Hey, wait, look at that shiny new gizmo. Why we could…