Luddites and Bombs

If one says anything against a machine these days, one risks being called a Luddite—a labor movement two centuries ago that featured workmen smashing machinery that they felt would replace them on the job market.
Over the years, the term “Luddite” has come to describe anyone who is against technology. It is often used, sneeringly, to describe anyone who might protest against the increasingly dominant role machines like computers play in our lives.
The Christmas bomber (would be bomber) story raises a valid point in this ancient argument. We are very, very lucky that all the young man did was burn his own underwear and private parts. He meant to do far worse—and might well have.
The other day I listened to an interview on public radio with the man who used to be head of security at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv in Israel. These people have been facing terrorist threats for decades—they have become very effective at handling them.
The retired security chief said that our problem with people like the young would-be bomber from Nigeria was that we were too dependent on our security machines at airports. He said that if a trained human had spent a moment or two looking at the young man, and then asked him a few pertinent questions, the bomber would have been stopped on the spot.
But, he pointed out, you don’t have experienced, skilled and trained observers at your airports—you depend on skilled MACHINES to check for bombs and bombers. The people, with very little real training, are merely there to operate the machines.
It takes a PERSON to recognize body language, to think through the fact that the young man paid cash, had no luggage, and was acting nervously. (When you want to solve a murder, you don’t send a machine, you send a trained detective. He may USE mechanical devices, but nothing replaces his eyes, his instincts, his experience.)
The former security head said machines should merely be there to serve the security people. The mechanical screeners and X-rays should only assist the trained eye of the human observer. That’s backward to how our airports do it now—except in places like Israel.
We have come to have supreme faith in our machinery—yet how many of us (me, for one) have stood at the reception window in a physician’s office, listening to the receptionist explain that she can schedule nothing today, the computer is down.
We live in a world where a computer may, at any moment, charge us the wrong amount, order the wrong item, give us the incorrect date or time. Yet we choose to depend upon them for our very lives in airports and other screening points.
Remember—a computer is the ultimate idiot savant. It can say “Yes” or “No” very, very rapidly. It can do nothing else. Many of the devices we use to screen for bombs, guns and knives are no brighter. The bombers and shooters are aware of this. They work long and hard to find new ways to confuse the machinery we’ve come to depend on.
They succeed from time to time because machinery, computer or body scanner, has no instincts, no memory of past incidents, no ability to profile, no gut hunches. And the people standing next to these devices are not expected—or even permitted—to use their own hunches.
We got very lucky Christmas day—and we’re going to have to go on depending on luck unless we bring back a human element in the security equation. The guy who used to do security at Ben Gurion now runs his own consulting company. He’s not a Luddite. He just understands what machines can and cannot do—and the dangers of over dependence on them.
Maybe we should hire him.