The narrator in this video calls it "faith in technology," as indeed it is. Perhaps you know someone who has hit his thumb with a hammer, nailed his leg with a nail gun, or taken off a finger with a table saw. Perhaps that person is you!
Well this clever fellow has developed a table saw that stops in1/1,000th of a second when it senses conductivity in what it is about to tear through. Wood is a very poor conductor of electricity, whereas fingers...well, you can see it on the video that includes real fingers and high speed cameras.
Are they working on a hammer that avoids thumbs? Perhaps they're working on a thumb that repels hammers.
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2 comments:
I could barely watch that. It would be a great piece of safety equipment to have, but I wonder what it would do to our sense of caution. Seat belts and air bags cause people to drive faster and more recklessly, because they believe they won't be hurt. Could a system like this lead to sloppy table saw use?
This is precisely what I thought, C7. My father, who worked in ergonomics, as so-called "human engineer" (scary title, I know), drew my attention to this downside to car safety engineering years ago. The safer we make our world, the weaker and more vulnerable we become.
You see the same in sanitization. We sanitize our children's environments with anti-bacterial this and that, and as a consequence they become more susceptible to sickness than they were before. I suspect this is why every other kid has a peanut allergy these days.
In Neil Postman's Technopoly, he reminds us that while we are mesmerized by what new technologies can do, we are all too blind to what they undo (p.5). With the gains are always attendant losses. (Thank you, Alisa, for the Postman insight.)
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