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I’m a member of an online discussion group and someone asked the question, “Has humanity become a malignant virus on earth?”

That got me to thinking.

And then I started writing.

Here’s my reply.

No. We are fully capable of performing wonderous and terrible things and all in between.  Many will call for the cleansing of the earth of our kind and that is a shame.

If all one looks at is the worst of us, then all one comes away with is the horrible things we do.

We are also incredibly gifted with potential that exceeds our perceived limitations. We just need to recognize this and push for that. 

And also we must kindly understand the misdeeds of our brethren and help each other want to be better versions of ourselves.  I don’t think malignant viruses are capable of this.

Heh, apologies if I sound a bit enthusiastic about our kind here.  I’ve just returned from a gathering of friends met to honor a mutual friend and his wife. 

He’d fallen about three years ago and died en route to the hospital due to a head injury.  He was brought back but suffered brain damage. He’s still in recovery and his right side is partially paralyzed. He can speak and move about but has lost the ability to come up with ways to say the words forming in his head.  Like understanding a foreign language when one hears the words but not knowing how to respond.

So why is this an example of the awesomeness of humankind?

Tonight I saw the result of the Drs and Nurses and folks who developed these things called “vehicles” and “hospitals” and my friend’s lovely and patient wife and the 50 or so friends who express continued interest in helping this family.

I saw the crooked smile on my friend’s face and saw his eyes light up as he saw familiar-yet-puzzling faces pop into view.

I see the glow of his wife taking in all the love and encouragement from those literally surrounding the two of them. She’s been the steadfast bearer of all the work involved with not only her husband’s health care but the raising of their kids and managing what little gov’t assistance they receive.

I saw hope for our kind tonight.  As ugly as we can be, we are also capable of being the lights that warm an otherwise cold and uncaring world.

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Designing and developing software solutions is a lot like building a bridge.

A bridge that moves.

A bridge that moves while we’re designing and developing it.

A bridge that moves while we’re designing and developing it while the fate of humankind rests on our shoulders.

Ok, yes I’m only slightly exaggerating on the last point.

Thinking about it, maybe software design and development is more like building a shiny motorbike than a bridge. Or a tiger. Yes a tiger that bites you when you’ve turned round to do more design and development.

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Inventors are optimistically ignorant of the real world.  I’ve two examples, one envisioned and one experienced today.

First the envisioned one: I saw an advert where a popular shipping company used a cute little wheeled robot delivering a package. The robot was rolling along on a brightly-lit day on a beautiful sidewalk. Hehehe we all know the reality of rain, cracked streets and vandals.

Secondly the experienced one: I’m driving a rental car this week. The car has a fancy cruise control feature that borders on self-driving. It will cruise at the requested speed until it senses an obstacle ahead of it (another vehicle, for example).  Now I know cruise control isn’t meant for heavy traffic, but I’m testing the waters here and seeing how self-driving cars would fare in our world.

Sadly they will fail. Not because of technology. Because they will follow rules and people will not.

Case in point: I set my cruise speed at slightly higher than the crowd I was driving with. Since the machine was being correct, it left a safe stopping distance between me and the vehicle ahead of me.  When the person ahead sped up, I did as well. When he or she left my lane and left a gap, my vehicle sped up until it reached my requested speed, and slowed down to match the new vehicle ahead of me.

All this in the rain, no less. I was impressed with the technology.

But I had to take over eventually.

Not because the machine stopped working.  It was working perfectly.

I stopped using it because the people around me were not working perfectly. My vehicle was actually causing an unsafe condition due to others’ horrible driving habits.

The issue was the nice safe spot between me and the vehicle ahead of me.  After a few minutes in a crowd, I noticed that EVERYONE wanted to climb into that spot.  Even the fellas behind me.  They’d weave around behind me to fill that gap… meaning my vehicle would politely slow down to open another gap, and another jumpy jackrabbit would hop into THAT gap. And so on.

It was like watching ducks at a pond at feeding time.  I didn’t want to cause a wreck, so I fell in line and left the 3/4-car length gap between me and the vehicle ahead of me to calm everyone down.

My lessons learned for today? Technology will never work as seen on the tv adverts until people are no longer allowed to use it, haha

(update)

Ah hey, well good news here. I figured out how to change the safety gap from 3 car lengths (the default) to 1 car length (apparently the smallest allowable in Houston traffic).

This was very nice and usable on the way home.  I’ll give it a go with the morning crowd to see the reaction.

Now I’m wondering how to retrofit this on my older truck, haha