We want technology to assist us, not to take over.

I stumbled upon that thought when listening to the latest installment of This Week in Google where Google’s latest foray into autonomously driving cars was discussed. What struck me was the sentiment, amidst the “Awesome!” that his technology represents, that people like to be in control of their cars, albeit usually being pretty bad at controlling the car. Of course, no driver would admit that they’re bad at driving. Yet no driver questions why all this technology they have in their cars is there. I’m talking Airbags, EPS, ABS braking, etc. – it is, of course, because we humans are inherently bad drivers, as the traffic accident statistics show.

Why then, we must ask, are we opposed to the possibility that cars might drive autonomously, and might even be better at it then we are?

The short answer is: because we love feeling we’re in control. Albeit arguably having very little control over most aspects of our lives. Technology which strips our perceived control from us gets rejected. And not only technology does. I believe a lot of the protests and outrage we see nowadays, may it be the Tea Party movement in the U.S. or the S21-protests in Germany have very little to do with actual policy propositions but rather are reaction to a perceived loss of control. I’d even go so far as to say that the perceived loss of control is reason to Germans rejecting Google Street View, or rather a broad sentiment in the populace that Technology and the Net in particular poses something unspecifically evil and threatening.

Yet despite all those reflexes of rejection, technological advances regularly turn our lives to the better. Airbags made previously fatal accidents less severe, autonomously driving cars could make traffic safer and more environmentally friendly, and I don’t think I need to explain the value the Net has brought to any of you.

The trick then, is to maintain the illusion of the user being in control by giving him the ability to do something without having disastrous effects on the system as a whole, further to encourage his engagement in non-critical areas. The trick is to stage a decoy. This happens in a lot of areas. Social Networks purposefully deteriorate the shown data quality as to not freak users out. Google unfortunately didn’t grasp that when they launched Buzz, therefore the outcries over privacy violations back then. Users felt they lost control over the data set that was available via Buzz despite having had no control over it whatsoever beforehand. It was only then that users creeped out, because they felt they lost control. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen as directed as in the Google Buzz fall-out, which is the reason why Facebook regularly finds itself confronted with confusing and conflicting accusations over several aspects of its operations. Especially the claims of Facebooks deteriorating privacy standards highlight this whole topic, as the discussion did not centre around there being room for possible privacy violations, but rather Facebook making it harder for the user to control the privacy settings.

I observe this in the Smart Metering and Home Automation market. Albeit the technology to completely automate a home and to make it substantially less energy consuming being there, the biggest stumbling block is the user and his desire to feel in control. Every Home Automation system needs safeguards for user intervention, although for most users this technology fades into the background almost instantly. They set it up once, and forget about it. So here again, we need to implement a decoy, something so obvious that the user interacts with this, and leaves the system to do its work.

Now, if you go in with a carefully crafted ad campaign, where everything beautifully interlocks with everything else, then this moron blindly slashing away with his pen will inevitably cock it all up. The solution is to give him a helicopter. A helicopter is something glaringly, obviously wrong, deliberately thrown in to satisfy a busybody’s need to “do something.”

It’s bad, but it seems like we need to give the users helicopters so we can get the systems to work.

Image: Coast Guard Helicopter by churl licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0