We Need To Stop Treating Technology Like It’s Foolproof

In a recent Discourse piece, Vanessa Brown Calder argues that if the government were to subsidize in vitro fertilization, a technology intended to assist people to conceive, the result could paradoxically be fewer babies. Why? For starters, because IVF is not a 100% effective technology. Actually, the success rate for an IVF patient is more like 30%, according to an average of doctors’ estimates. And, as Calder notes, the chance of success diminishes over time: “According to data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, IVF procedures result in a baby about 50% of the time for women younger than 35, but less than 8% of the time for women older than 40.”

Calder’s piece makes the point that the way we think about technology can have unintended consequences. A theoretically beneficial policy, such as subsidizing IVF to encourage and produce more births, can backfire if we trust the technology too much. In this case, many of us may end up waiting too long to have children because we think we can always turn to IVF when we’re ready. This argument got me thinking about how we view technology in general, specifically that we sometimes tend to over-rely on technology and think much of it as 100% effective when it’s not. After all, the light always comes on when we flip the switch, doesn’t it?

Sometimes the technology itself is the problem, as when generative AI “hallucinates” information that has no basis in fact. As it turns out, few technologies, especially new ones, are foolproof.

But both natural and human interference can also cause technological failures. A sobering example of the former is the tragic devastation caused by recent Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Weeks after the storms, thousands of people are still without power and are finding creative ways to meet their—and their neighbors’—electricity needs. No matter how sophisticated and reliable our power grid is most of the time, it remains at the mercy of the weather.

As for human interference with technological efficacy, contraceptives such as condoms are inexpensive and easily accessible in the U.S. Yet according to the CDC, 41.6% of pregnancies in the U.S. in 2019 were unintended. Studies have shown that much of this problem is about user error rather than a flaw in the technology itself. In other words, any technology is only as good as the people who are using it.

Sometimes the problem is that we lean on technology to the point where we lose skills that we once took for granted. For instance, how many of us follow our GPS blindly, only to become totally lost because, after our phone has died and the GPS has stopped working, our sense of direction and map-reading has atrophied to the point of uselessness?

So we clearly over-rely on technology in a variety of ways. But somewhat surprisingly, we often under-rely on it, too. A shocking number of people don’t take their medications as prescribed, whether because they can’t afford refills, they don’t like the way the meds make them feel or they simply forget. More than 8% of Americans don’t wear seat belts, despite the fact that about half the passenger vehicle occupants killed in car accidents in 2022 weren’t buckled in.

None of this is meant to imply that technology is usually anything other than a wonderful and amazing thing. The correct response to a technological failure shouldn’t be to abandon the technology altogether but to find a way to improve it or improve the way we use it. Successful instances of this approach are legion, but take airplanes: The Wright brothers’ first-ever flight lasted 12 seconds, and the aircraft was later damaged beyond repair because the wind blew it over while it was parked on the ground. Nowadays, of course, planes travel halfway across the world and are much more reliable: The average American’s annual risk of dying in a plane crash is now a minuscule one in 11 million. Even the flight process itself is mostly automated—but pilots are still trained to fly manually in the rare event that the automated system fails.

For me, that’s the best way to thread the needle of over- or under-reliance on technology. Use it without anxiety and expect it to work as intended. The vast majority of the time, the light will turn on and the GPS will get you where you want to go. But no technology is 100% effective, and it’s naive to expect it to solve all our problems. So it doesn’t hurt to stock up on some flashlights, throw a map or two in the back of your car or make sure the people flying your plane know what they’re doing—just in case.

Meanwhile ...

What I’m watching: Confession time—I am a total chicken when it comes to all things horror. A couple years ago, I was traveling in Austria with a friend, and we happened to be in the village of Hallstatt on the night of its annual Krampus run. People dress up as Krampus, a monster who punishes naughty children at Christmastime, and run through the streets menacing the spectators and anyone else who happens to be walking by. My friend was delighted by these festive hijinks, but I didn’t even make it past the introductory ominous music before retreating to the safety of the hotel.

That said, with Halloween approaching, I do like to seek out entertainment that’s slightly spooky and outside my comfort zone. I’ve landed on Alfred Hitchcock’s movies as a happy medium: suspenseful enough to give me a thrill, but not so terrifying as to induce actual nightmares. Needless to say, I’m not talking about the straight-up horror offerings like “Psycho” or “The Birds.” Instead, this Halloween, I plan to settle in with Hitchcock’s classic of suspense, “Notorious.”

Starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, “Notorious” is a 1946 spy film in which Grant’s American intelligence agent recruits Bergman’s party girl to go undercover to root out some dangerous Nazi sympathizers right after World War II. She’s the daughter of a German war criminal, so she has the right bona fides, and she soon attracts the admiration of Grant’s target: a Nazi, played by Claude Rains, who’s involved in a nefarious plot. What happens when Rains discovers where Bergman’s true loyalties lie, I’ll leave you to discover. But the dramatic tension is unbeatable, and the final shot of the film is truly chilling—a perfect “spooky” movie for the scaredy-cats among us who don’t mind getting a little scared once a year!

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