In the thrall of the tech on the busy sidewalks of London/Craig Medred photo

Curse of the machines

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – Almost from the moment of arrival at Heathrow Airport on the outskirts of this teeming European metropolis, you are confronted by the machines steadily taking over our lives.

Gone from UK Customs are the people. In their place are rows of scanners waiting to view passports, snap photographs of faces, and use facial recognition software to decide who should pass and who should not.

Self-driving cars to transport people to the city have not yet arrived outside the terminal, but the government has said they are coming by 2026.

Those self-controlled machines have a “huge number of potential uses, the obvious one is 88 percent or so of road traffic collisions we see today are caused by driver error of some description,” Transport Secretary Mark Harper told the BBC two days after Christmas.

Sitting in the back of a cab still driven by a human with nothing to do but watch the traffic on the drive into the city from Heathrow, it is pretty easy to see why so many collisions are caused by human error.

Many drivers spend a lot of time looking at something other than the road ahead, and it is hard to avoid running into things when your eyes are focused on viewing a video screen or some other distraction.

The UK has a law against screen viewing, as do 48 U.S. states, with the British government warning that “you can get six penalty points and a £200 ($248) fine if you hold and use a phone, sat nav, tablet, or any device that can send and receive data while driving or riding a motorcycle,” but it would appear the penalty or a lack of enforcement fall short of discouraging the behavior.

Or maybe the power of the technology has come to overwhelm human judgment. Blame the machines that have been rewiring our command centers for decades now.

Korean researchers in 2020 reported the discovery that smartphones could alter the chemical balance of gamma-aminobutyric acid, an inhibitory neurotransmitter, and glutamate-glutamine, a calming neurotransmitter, in the human brain.

“Recently, the high accessibility of smartphones has led to severe functional impairments compared with conventional internet addiction,” they warned. “Smartphone addiction is a behavioral or technological addiction based on internet” use.

One sees this not only on the roads of the UK but on the sidewalks in London where a significant number of people can’t even put their phones down in order to watch where they are walking.

Machine dictates

There is today much discussion of the “danger” of artificial intelligence (AI), the newest technological development.

“Experts are warning AI could lead to human extinction. Are we taking it seriously enough?” CNN headlined in May above a story that “warned top industry leaders are frantically sounding the alarm about. These technologists and academics keep smashing the red panic button, doing everything they can to warn about the potential dangers artificial intelligence poses to the very existence of civilization.”

Far less attention, if any, is given to what the machines have already done to us. This despite the pandemic of the unfit that left millions dead around the globe.

Many of those deaths can be linked to an addiction to motor vehicles, the most significant and transformative machine of the 20th Century; television; and the internet that have combined to lead the residents of the Western world to spend ever more time sitting and ever less time moving.

If the onerous AI predictions ever come to pass, the last words written by human historians might be these:

“First they came for our bodies, and we embraced the convenience and the ease. And then the dirty bastards came for our brains, and we were helpless to resist.”

Just before the pandemic began killing the unfit – and let’s accept the reality as recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control  that both before and after the introduction of vaccines the burden of death in the pandemic focused on those people that one-time CDC director Dr. Rochelle  Walensky called the “unwell” – a peer-reviewed study published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, warned that “prolonged total sitting time and…sedentary behaviors, particularly sitting watching television, have been associated with increased risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and overall mortality.”

The study of data from 2001 to 2016, published only a year before the pandemic erupted in the U.S., also warned that sitting time versus active time was continuing to increase largely due to computer viewing being added to television viewing time.

“The estimated prevalence of computer use during leisure time of one hour per day or more significantly increased among all age groups with more pronounced increase among adults. Between 2007 and 2016, the estimated total sitting time increased by nearly one hour per day among adolescents and adults. Although these trends were comparable among most subgroups, males, non-Hispanic blacks, obese or physically inactive individuals reported significantly higher estimated prevalence of prolonged sitting watching television.”

Males, non-Hispanic blacks, the obese and the physically inactive were all destined to suffer higher rates of death when the pandemic hit the next year.  By May 2023, as the pandemic was easing, the CDC would be reporting that “the highest overall death rates by age, race and ethnicity, and sex occurred among persons who were aged greater than or equal to 85 years, non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native, non-Hispanic black or African American (black), and male.”

The CDC does not track physical inactivity, but if it did, that would surely be on that list of factors boosting death rates. A peer-reviewed study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that the “physically inactive were more than twice as likely to be admitted to hospital (with Covid-19) as those who clocked up 150-plus minutes of physical activity every week.

“They were also 73 percent more likely to require intensive care, and two and a half times more likely to die of the infection,” the study added.

One could blame these victims of the pandemic for their own deaths, but that would be overlooking the subtle and seductive role of the machines.

Human evolution

Technology has, of course, been a part of human evolution since long before we began recording history. As a species, we are hard-wired to crave things that make our lives easier in response to the prime directive that applies to all animals, the desire to get fat.

Fat is for most species the equivalent of money. It is the only way to save the plenty of today for the possible scarcity of tomorrow. As a practical matter, this changed for the human species when we learned how to preserve and store food, something few other animals on the planet have learned.

And it changed even more when we created monetary systems, which made the plenty of today much more easily stored for the scarcity of tomorrow. But even before these things happened, tools were changing our lives and our slow but steady progress in tool-making was setting the stage for the rise of the machines that would radically alter both the way that we live and the way that we think.

It took homo sapiens almost three million years to progress from stone tools to the wheel, but only about 5,300 years to progress from the wheel to the first vehicular machine – a steam-powered three-wheeler – and only about 100 years to jump from that machine to the first automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine.

Less than 15 years after that, Henry Ford introduced the first Model T to the world, and all hell started to break loose. That was in 1908.

Only six years later, the first commercial airline went into operation. It failed, but by 1918, the U.S. Post Office had instituted “air mail” delivery and the age of commercial aviation had begun. 

Within less than 100 years, people would be boarding airplanes to fly off to visit friends and relatives half a world away as easily as they once mounted a horse or climbed into a horse-drawn carriage to visit friends and relatives only a few hundred miles away.

And then, at or near the same time humans were taking flight, came the first broadcasting networks to spread words on a new device called a “radio,” which was shortly to be replaced by a device called a “television,” which was destined to be displaced and/or expanded by that thing called a “computer” connected to something called the “internet.”

Most of this was considered good and wonderful, though, Ford’s machine had by 1988 spawned the first case of what would come to be called “road rage.”

“A fit of ‘road rage’ has landed a man in jail, accused of shooting a woman
passenger who’s [sic] car had ‘cut him off’ on the highway,” the St. Petersburg Times newspaper reported that year.

Since then – as the motor vehicle has fostered “motonormativity” in the Western world – road rage has become not only a part of the common vernacular but a curse stalking many a driver.

 “Nearly 80 percent of drivers expressed (experiencing) significant anger, aggression or road rage behind the wheel at least once in the previous 30 days,” the American Automobile Association (AAA) Foundation for Traffic Safety reported in 2019.

And the website Everytown U.S. Policy and Research last year reported road rage shootings in the U.S. were continuing to go up even as shootings in general were going down. It cited data showing a doubling of road-rage shooting deaths from 70 in 2018 to 141 in 2022.

The trend appears to be continuing. Just a day ago, the Chicago Sun-Times reported a Windy City firefighter had been charged with attempted murder after one such shooting in Illinois. The gunfire, according to the Times, erupted after a Jeep collided with the Chevrolet Tahoe of 34-year-old Omotayo Kassim’s Chevrolet Tahoe.

The driver of the Jeep fled, the newspaper reported, and “Kassim chased the Jeep for several blocks and rammed into (it) causing the 35-year-old Jeep driver to lose control and crash into parked cars.”

When the driver of the Jeep got out of his car, Kassim is reported to have yelled “don’t move or I’ll shoot” before shooting the man in the face. Sixty-three-year-old Philip Fahey, a witness to the shooting, told the newspaper that “it just seems kind of unreasonable that this guy got shot for a traffic altercation.”

But in a world where some people have come to love their machines more than their families and friends, such behavior is somewhat to be expected even if it is totally unjustifiable.

Risk assessment

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It is happening in a society where driving has become as fundamental a part of life as eating and sleeping. This has even fostered the belief among some that driving is a right, not a privilege, and the widespread idea that driving is inherently “safe.”

It isn’t.

There is a bad disconnect in the U.S. in this regard. Many worry about gun control and almost none worry about motor vehicle control although your odds of being shot and killed are significantly less than those of your being killed by a motor vehicle.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that 10,258 people were murdered with firearms in the U.S. in 2019, the last year for which full data is available. 

In the same year, the National Safety Council recorded more than three times as many people – 36,096 – killed in motor vehicle collisions.

With nearly 335 million people living in the U.S., this would make the odds of being murdered by a firearm in 2009 about 1 in 32,700 with the odds of being killed by a car or truck at 1 in 9,280.

But this difference, no matter how large, undercounts the reality of how much more dangerous motor vehicles are for the average American than guns because race plays a huge role in the odds of death in the U.S.

In 2022, the FBI reported that in a total of 19,196 homicides involving weapons of all types, 10,470 of the victims or 55 percent were black while only 7,704 or 40 percent were white. The other 5 percent were of either “other” or unknown races, according to Statista, a data tracking website.

When this sad reality is applied to the homicide numbers, it quickly becomes clear the nation’s 40.1 million black Americans are at far greater risks of death by homicide in general with a rate of 1 in 3,830 versus the odds for white Americans which fall to 1 in 38,279.

And yet this, too, is only part of the picture. FBI data over the years has generally shown that less than 10 percent of homicide victims are killed by strangers.

Factor these qualifiers into the equation and the odds a white American will be killed by a stranger using a firearm – firearms annually accounting for about 70 percent of homicides – the odds fall to about 1 in about 382,990.

Motor vehicle collisions, unlike homicides, largely involve strangers and they are not as greatly influenced by race as homicides, though even there the National Safety Council says black Americans have about a 42 percent greater chance of death, primarily because they are far more likely to be struck and killed when walking or riding a bicycle on or near a roadway.

Deaths of white pedestrians have actually been falling since 2018, according to the Council, but this is apparently because fewer and fewer Americans who can afford cars walk anywhere because of the fear of being run down by a motor vehicle.

The mobility data analytics firm Streetlight has reported U.S. walking trips dropping “by a stunning 36 percent between 2019 and 2022 despite a global respiratory pandemic that some hoped would encourage more pedestrian activity,” George Kevin Jordan noted on the StreetsBlog website earlier this year. “Worse, all 50 states experienced a walking decline, and every major metro lost walking activity.”

And this abandonment of simple, everyday exercise appears destined to grow given a societal disinterest in doing anything about it.

Many are the guilty

The general unwillingness of the many, maybe even most, to pay attention to their driving and slow down in congested urban areas to prevent deaths and injuries should be obvious to anyone who walks around Anchorage or almost any other major American city.

One of the most interesting things about London, where many streets now have 20 mph speed limits, is how much safer that city felt than Anchorage where, like in many American cities, there are few streets with speed limits so low and a general disregard for those slower speeds where so posted.

Speeds greater than 20 have been directly linked to the steady increase in U.S. pedestrian and cyclist deaths in motor vehicle collisions even as the number of vulnerable road users on U.S. streets has declined.

In February of last year, the Governors Highway Safety Association reported the country has reached the point where a pedestrian is killed by a motor vehicle every 75 minutes.  The body count, an association statement added, hit “a 40-year high in pedestrian deaths in 2021 and continues a gruesome decade-long trend of more people dying while walking on U.S. roads.

“Why are more people walking dying on U.S. roads? A combination of factors, including a surge in dangerous driving that began at the start of the pandemic and has not lessened; larger, heavier vehicles that are more likely to seriously injure or kill people on foot in the event of a crash; roads designed to prioritize fast-moving traffic over slower speeds that are safer for pedestrians; and inadequate infrastructure such as sidewalks, crosswalks and lighting in many parts of the country.”

Some of those problems seem simple and easily solved, but they’re not. More people want larger and heavier vehicles to protect themselves because distracted driving, much of it linked to smart phones, has steadily increased the number of motor vehicle accidents in the U.S.

“The estimated number of police-reported traffic crashes increased from 5.25 million in
2020 to 6.10 million in 2021, a statistically significant 16-percent increase,” the National Highway Traffic Administration reported last year.  Part of this can be explained by an 8.1 percent increase in miles driven, but that only accounts for half of the increase.

Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which has been tracking distracted driving via data sensors on the phones of millions of Americans, has reported a steady increase in this behavior since the pandemic began.

“Fortunately, as traffic has mostly returned for commuting hours, speeding has
somewhat normalized,” the company reported last year. “Unfortunately, distracted driving has not followed this trend. Time spent distracted was higher in February 2022 than at any point in the last three years.”

Clearly, Americans are as reluctant to give up the convenience of their phones in the interest of safety as they are unwilling to slow down in congested urban areas because that too might inconvenience them.

As Henry Grabar observed at Slate in 2021, “The nation’s most disobeyed law is dysfunctional from top to bottom. The speed limit is alternately too low on interstate highways, giving police discretion to make stops at will, and too high on local roads, creating carnage on neighborhood streets.

“Enforcement is both inadequate and punitive. The cost is enormous. And the lack of political will to do something about it tracks with George Carlin’s famous observation that everybody going faster than you is a maniac and everybody going slower than you is an idiot. The consensus is: Enforce the speed limit. But not on me, please. Because while it would be nice to save 10,000 lives a year, it sure is fun to drive fast.”

Drivers are ultimately responsible for the fallout, but the machines have driven their thinking. Americans now expect any and all travel to be easy and convenient, and they resent seeing their tax dollars spent on any sort of infrastructure other than that designed to make driving easier and more convenient.

Ever wider and faster roads, in; sidewalks, crosswalks and bike paths, out.

Lower speed limits? A burdensome inconvenience. Deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists? Their fault for being on or near a roadway in anything but a car. The declining health of the American population because so many now spend so much time sitting in a motor vehicle or behind some sort of viewing screen? Who cares.

And this is just the beginning of what the machines have done to us. A whole new chapter is about to unfold. This was obvious in London where the Victoria Station McDonald’s operated almost free of humans.

A brave new world

You order on a machine there. You pay on a machine. Machinery appeared to handling most of the food processing. The only two humans who could be seen at work in the whole place on a December morning were there to hand orders over to customers holding receipts issued by the machines.

What happens to a society as machines steadily replace entry-level jobs is hard to predict, but the history of the world has shown that having a lot of young people out of work, especially young males, creates problems.

Historically, sociologist Jack Goldstone has observed, revolutions are prevalent in countries with large numbers of young people unemployed. Though a revolution might seem impossible in a relatively well-off U.S., one might want to think about the demographics of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.

“A substantial majority of the protesters were white in the cities where the data was gathered with the highest percentage in Minneapolis (85 percent), followed by Los Angeles (78 percent), and Atlanta and New York (both at 76 percent),” according to data collected by Mobilewalla, a company that claims to track data from 1.5 billion mobile devices worldwide. ” Protesters in the 35-54 age group was less than 10 percent overall,” likely because most of them were either busy at work or dealing with family issues.

The BLM riots involving a lot of young people out of work because of the pandemic might have been a snapshot of what is to come as machines continue to replace ever more jobs with AI only helping to allow the machines to do even more tomorrow than today to make our lives easier and more convenient right up until the point ease and convenience begin to kill us.

Or maybe that is already happening.

U.S. life expectancy has lagged between the growth rate of that of many other countries since the 1950s, and “the gap with other countries widened dramatically after 2010 when life expectancy plateaued in the United States but continued increasing elsewhere,” according to a study that appeared in the American Journal of Public Health in September. 

“A recent demonstration of the U.S. health disadvantage occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic when the United States experienced more Covid-19 deaths than any other country and among the highest per capita death rates. U.S. life expectancy decreased by 2.1 years between 2019 and 2021, the largest decrease in a century. Other high-income countries experienced smaller decreases in life expectancy during the pandemic, widening the gap to historic levels.

“A 2021 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine attributed the stagnation in US life expectancy to an increase in mortality rates in midlife (25–64 years). This increase, which no other country experienced, was caused primarily by U.S. deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol-related causes, suicides, and cardiometabolic diseases.”

All of those causes of death link back to the sedentary lifestyle or what some now call “sitting disease,” which has been shown to compromise cardiac health, mental health and general fitness, which played a key role in driving Covid-19 death rates.

“By 2019, the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, 39 populous countries had higher life expectancy than did the United States,” the study published in Public Health noted. “The gap with Hong Kong, which had the world’s highest life expectancy, was 6.1 years. Life expectancy in some U.S. states was lower than in developing countries. In 2019, life expectancy in West Virginia and Mississippi was lower than in the State of Palestine. The large decrease in US life expectancy that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic – larger than in all countries but Bulgaria and Slovakia – enabled six more countries to surpass the United States. By 2021, the gap with Hong Kong had reached 8.3 years.”

It would appear that while some worry about the smart machines of the future killing us, there is a good argument to be made that the dumb machines of the present have already begun the process. But only because we consciously or unconsciously let them and oftentimes even help them.