To move things onwards slowly but swiftly, an article on tagging passengers around airports caught my eye. In particular, there seems to be a trial going ahead despite readily-foreseeable weaknesses:
Colin Brooks, Optag co-ordinator, said the trial would determine if the tags would be feasible in the light of obvious problems, such as the possibility that people might ditch their tags to avoid detection, or swap them with another person.
The obvious way to solve this is to implant tags upon entry (in fact, don't some trendy bars (run by Kevin Warwick?) do this now? :-/ ), or maybe just some super-strong glue will do the trick. Either that or make sure they explode if removed within designated zones...
Also note that the first listed reasoning behind it is "improving airport efficiency". Contemplate that for a moment, and remember that, by nature, humans are generally quite "inefficient" anyway.
It's been a couple of months away, but we still need to ask what we really want our technology to do for us, or to us.
3 comments:
The efficiency of an airport is not the same as the efficiency of the people in the airport. Airports are deliberately designed to be inefficient for passengers - they make us walk long distances from the gate so that we don't all arrive at the passport check at the same time, and we don't have so long to wait in the baggage hall.
So they intend to use technologies such as tagging to push even more people through airports without employing more staff do they? Well if it works for cattle and sheep ...
Interesting distinction, Richard. I've noticed in general that "efficiency for people" doesn't always (often?) translate into efficiency for the system - take credit cards, for example. Much quicker to pay by cash (no remote connection), plus if everyone paid by cash then things might be cheaper (as stores pass on the cost of card transactions to the consumer). But few people pay with cash.
Tagging just removes the "risk" of people trying to be more efficient themselves - a move from a probabilistic airport efficiency (chances are X people will turn up over N minutes), to a newtonian-style control over the individual (person A will arrive at time N, person B at N + 1...).
Half the problem with modern life is that so many people are involved in decision-making that the processes become something machinistic. Decisions are taken based on paper, not thought through.
Some likely well-meaning group of people have come up with a solution that if any of them actually thought about is actually quite horrific.
But again - 'if you haven't done anything wrong, you haven't got anything to worry about'...
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