Why I am adverse to "Technology"

A recurring theme in Science Fiction and Fantasy is "Trust nothing unless you know where its brains reside". 

That is good advice.

Example

There I was at 5:30AM transporting a young man to work. His vehicle was out of gas and the local station had declined his payment card.

I jumped in Mrs ERJ's new (2013) minivan and picked up the wee-lad.

I-96 is a bit of spaghetti-on-a-plate west of the Lansing Road exit as it merges with I-69. I found myself in the center lane and really wanted to be in the lane to the right of it.

I checked the rearview mirror and started to slide into the lane to the right.

"WTF!!!" came out of my passenger.

I tapped the brakes and twitched the steering wheel to the left to stay in my original lane. Then some yaw-control with the steering wheel. A quick glance in my right side, rear-view mirror and I saw a "rice-burner" approaching at a high rate of speed also engaged in yaw-control.

I glanced down at my speedo and I was down to 60 MPH. I had the cruise-control on at exactly 70 before the excitement happened.

The rice-burner passed me on the right side at approximately +30 MPH.

Postmortem

The outside, rear-view mirrors were in the extreme outboard orientation. That would be about right if the seat was in the extreme, rearward position and the vertical seat-bun was reclined back.

I rarely fiddle with Mrs ERJ's mirror settings. They are close enough as long as I don't adjust the seat position. Mrs ERJ being of small stature tends to drive with the seat extremely far forward.

One thing that I dislike about Mrs ERJ's ride is that even though it is ten years old, it was high-end when it was made. It has lots of bells-and-whistles.

For example, the electronic display changed its mode when one of the tire's air pressure dropped due to the changing ambient temperatures. The entire display was replaced by a schematic with flashing messages warning of impending mayhem due to our out-of-compliance tire. It was 32psi vs the specified 36psi.

I added air to the tire and the flashing messages disappeared but the changed display did not revert back to what it was before.

Mrs ERJ was finally able to toggle it back to what she wanted after scientifically pushing buttons until she got what she wanted.

I suspect that somewhere in the eye-of-bat-wing-of-newt button pushing sequence Mrs ERJ activated mirror presets or preferences stored by the previous owner.

Living in a dark rural area with two-lane roads, I did not have the means nor (until today) motivation to double-double-check-check the rear-view mirrors.

My bad.

I don't KNOW that is what happened but it is my best, educated guess at this time.

Artificial Intelligence

One way to define Artificial Intelligence is "A menu of pull-down actions that are automatically selected and implemented based on conditions as determined by sensors. The pull-down actions are programmed based on the engineer's sense of what he thinks is best."

Knowing a little bit about sensors I am not thrilled by their occasional lack of robustness. Having been an engineer and worked with hundreds of them, I am not ready to call their thought processes "intuitively pleasing". Nor am I thrilled by what happens to "engineering' when lawyers and bean-counters add to the pot and stir.