“Why won’t people just follow the rules?”
That was the name of an article about industrial safety and industrial accidents that I’ve read a few weeks ago. Then I had a dream quite closely related to the subject matter of the article. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while, and decided that, yeah, this really is legitimate reasoning coming out of this dream. Sometimes, dreams that people have are more fantasy than logic, but this one was rather sound logic, great for reflection in a technical context.
The key points:
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Humans have a generally poor understanding of safety with modern industrial technology.
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The primary form of industrial technology that is most desirable to use in direct contact with laypeople is, of course, motorized transportation. This is, of course, because it is necessary that the user/beneficiary of the machine be within its proximity, else motor vehicles could not be used to transport humans, only objects and animals.
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Designers of such machines, when it is possible to completely automate them, will go above and beyond out of their way to perfect the fail-safes and fault-tolerant engineering. This often comes at the price of designing the machine to operate only under limited conditions. For example, in the case of motorized transport, the restriction that it can only operate over limited ranges, at limited speeds, and in limited environments.
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In order to get those last few degrees of freedom, a human operator must be placed in charge to manage the heightened risk in more diverse, less predictable environments. When designers attempted to design an automated machine that could handle such unknown environments, its safety performance simply never added up to what was achieved with a human that could adaptively and intelligently manage the risk. BUT…
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This is the crux, the key point that we fail to realize: Often times, we’re totally missing the point. The point isn’t that a human-driven machine will be safer, the point is that we’re endemically increasing the riskiness of the situation, and often times that heightened risk is not even necessary to accomplish the primary goal.
Okay, so with that summary in-hand, I’ll dive straight into a retelling of the dream, no need to over-analyze during the dream retelling. Then, I’ll follow up with a few more relevant comments and analysis.
The pertinent parts of the dream start in a building that is approximately 8 stories tall. It could be an office building, it could be an apartment building, but I am not sure of the purpose. There are four elevator shafts at one end of the building, I take the elevators up to the seventh floor. But to get to the 8th floor, you can’t use one of the two regular use elevators that operate from floors 1 to 7. You have to use one of the two special, manually operated elevators. So, I go to the eighth floor from one of those elevators, and lo and behold, I see a whole renaissance party room. Purportedly, this eighth floor was strictly a room for maintenance purposes like for housing the elevator machine rooms and a utility room for other things, but the surplus space got converted, with a nice decorative red carpeted floor and lots of renaissance amusements and attractions.
So, I turn around, and take a good look at the elevator operator platforms. They are stationed in front of the elevator doors at half the height of the elevators, pretty much above the elevator door height but not completely. The platform specifically was placed between the space between each elevator shaft so it would not block the elevator, and this is possible because the manual and automatic elevators are spaced even-odd. At the top of the automatic elevator shafts is a solid structure housing the bulkier automatic elevator equipment, whereas the manual elevator have a relatively small pulley mechanism just right above the top of their usable height, and the rest of the support machinery and winding action, of course, comes from the operator platforms. The main point is, the elevator operators were stationed such that they were pretty much eye-level with the pulley mechanism that controlled the top of the elevator cables. On the elevator operator platform was a bulkier winch-like spool mechanism that purportedly had additional gearing inside of it, there was a crank handle on the side of this, functioning as a “wind-up lever,” that the elevator operator was responsible for winding up to supply the necessary drive force for the elevator. There were also other cable controls the elevator operator used for directing the elevator.
So, how did these controls all work together? After being in the renaissance party room for a short while, I decided to go back down to one of the main floors of the building. So, I got inside one of the elevator carts with a few other folks, which had visibly open windows so you could kind of see what was going on outside the elevator like at the operator platform, and after pushing one of the buttons inside the cart to indicate which floor I wanted to go to (we were all going to the same ground floor), I heard a “music box” playing and the elevator only moved downward very slowly. I saw the elevator operator was winding around the crank-handle on the side of the winch-like spool mechanism rapidly. “This is going to take forever at this rate” another person in the elevator cart says. But just then after they finished saying that, and also after waiting a total maybe 30 seconds of winding, then whole elevator cart starts moving at an appreciable pace and makes an elevator motion sound kind of like a dry car tire-asphalt road rumble noise of some sort, I guess I would describe it like that. And now we are at the ground floor of the building and we all get out of the elevator cart.
Well, now that was a pretty interesting demonstration of “renaissance fair” technology for even the elevators to get to the renaissance party room. A few minutes later, I decide I want to go back to the renaissance party room. This time, I signal to go into one of the special elevators and push the button to go up to the eighth floor. I can hear the music box off in the distance, and I relax since I know it will just be a couple of seconds of waiting for the wind-up to complete, and sure enough, it does complete and the elevator goes up just like you’d expect a normal elevator to do. Then up there again, the main I do is look back and observe the manual elevator operation.
Then I see an interesting incidental event. “Interesting, that pulley wheel looks a little loose,” I thought to myself, looking up at the pulley wheel as its slight side-to-side wobbling off its axis caught my attention. The operator was decidedly nodding his head taking a look up at the loose pulley wheel and concluding that it should still be stable enough just to traverse one level down. (Then the occupant could be instructed to exit right there and take tne fully automatic elevators for the remainder of their trip.) But, the loosening kept getting worse, and pretty soon it was wobbling quite erratically, leaving me concerned that it would break off altogether and the whole elevator cart would free-fall drop.
“Shaft 6, ABORT!” yelled a man voice from the far right side of the operators platform. Looked like the overall supervisor for the individual elevator operators. The elevator operator then no longer attempts to finish brining the elevator cart to floor 7, but instead turns around with the cable controls to bring the elevator up to the top.
“Leave your scarf,” says a woman voice. A second or so later, you can see the occupant in the elevator almost at the top. That wasn’t a scarf, it was his tie. It got stuck in between a wall gap while the elevator was being emergency removed, it was stretched out but he still was able to get it unstuck and it was still on his neck.
Now the elevator is brought all the way to the top, just a few feet above floor level, and the elevator operator is now moving the elevator forward toward the platforms and completely out of the shafts, purportedly via some special cable control mechanisms. At the point where it is all the way out, it is visibly tilted sideways. The elevator operator is now lowering the elevator down to the floor level. But before it is lowered down to floor level, due to the significant tilt of the elevator, and the occupant sitting on the floor all stressed after that stuck tie event, he slides out sideways and falls to the floor level. He falls down on his back and moans, now laying flat. What was that, like a 3 foot drop? Sure it was onto a carpeted surface, but this is like commercial carpet with stiff floor and minimal padding within it and underneath it.
“Check his back, check his back,” says a woman voice, purportedly another safety inspector on the opposite side of the elevator operator platforms from the supervisor.
Then a woman comes walking across the floor, blond wavy hair in “down” style, medium body build, and somewhat taller than average, purportedly a nurse of a sort, and gets down to carefully and gently analyze his back bone, purportedly to check if there may have been any fractures from the fall and he would need special attention to transport to a hospital.
Then, I thought to myself. This is the kind of accident that happened every once and a while in the old days, and people were just use to it because, over the course of an individual’s lifetime, it would have observably, visibly been seen several times. But nowadays, it’s a real bummer to see it so realistically played out, in fact lived out, in modern times, because it is so easy to prevent, and in our day to day lives, precisely the thing that is prevented due to our modern safety technology.
Again, this is the kind of dream that is just so real and truthful that it is worth recording and remembering for logical decision making purposes. So, what other lessons to be learned do I have to say?
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The prospect of social activity is an extreme stimulant for humans, much so that for the sake of social contact and interaction, humans are willing to leap to obtain presence within the social activity at an impulse. Even when it comes at a clear expense of safety.
This is why motor vehicles are so addicting to suburban teens, and, consequentially, such high restrictions are placed in a graduated driver’s license system.
They primarily desire to maximize the end result, without questioning the justice or prudence of the means to that end. And temperance by forfeiting exposure to social interaction? Ha, no way. Prudence, justice, temperance, that’s three of the four cardinal virtues to fall short of right there.
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Elevators? Ha! Come on, elevators are safe, right? Well, they are now, but they weren’t always safe. The first elevators were hand-operated by a human operator, and they were not designed with nearly the number of safety precautions that are present in modern elevators.
The difference between the “business” elevators and the party room elevators? It’s the difference between driving the farm truck versus the party mobile. The risks they’re willing to take are very low in the business elevator. Versus, the risks they’re willing to take are very high in the party elevator.
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Interestingly, having a mind for rational safety precautions in all circumstances seems more prevalent among those who are technical and mathematically inclined.
But, the biggest and final lesson to be learned. That is a bit more complicated to describe and will take a longer discussion. Ultimately, much of the risk we experience is of our own choosing, we think we’re choosing means and mechanisms that give us more freedom when really, we completely miss the point and we’re just choosing to take unnecessary risk.
The discussion of motor vehicles provides an excellent way to demonstrate this point. As previously mentioned, this is a technology that has become popular not necessarily for prudent causes, though it can used for virtuous purposes.
Let’s use a risk analysis of one of the first, and what should purportedly be one of the most obvious, risks of a motor vehicle: driving off-road. The number one problem with driving off road is that you never know if the ground ahead of you continues. That is an assumption that can be blissfully made when driving on-road. This is particularly a problem when driving in a hilly landscape, because especially if you are driving fast enough such that your stopping distance is greater than the length of ground available on the other side of the hill, before you run over the edge of a cliff. True story, a college classmate of mine was in the military and driving around off-road in a hilly landscape to patrol in the Middle-East. But then he plunged over the edge, the vehicle was totally smashed at the bottom of the cliff, but everyone inside was pretty much okay and nobody was seriously injured, if I remember correctly.
So, in this situation, we can see the clear unnecessary risk factor at stake: driving too fast off-road. But this isn’t the only unnecessary risk taken. An alternate less risky way to do the on-ground patrolling in the area could have involved the combination of a remote-controlled drone and the on-ground vehicle. The remote controlled drone is used to sight the ground from the air, and maybe also build a local map. That guidance is then use to determine where, if at all, to drive the on-ground vehicle, and what precautions need to be taken.
Here’s another true story giving an example of the risks of driving off-road. A high school classmate was driving an ATV off road, hit a rock and flipped over upside down. Luckily, he landed wheels down. But if he landed head down, he definitely would not have been so fortunate since this was an open-top vehicle.
Obviously, the clearest solution to the problem of off-road driving is to simply not drive a motor vehicle in hilly offroad landscapes. Only drive a vehicle on-road, and the road constructors will guarantee that the land is roadworthy for the rated speed limit by flattening hills and filling valleys to attain the required visual lookahead for safe stopping distance in the event of a road obstruction. And, in the event the road is destroyed and no longer continues forward, such incident of missing road will be clearly visible.
Driving off-road is endemically more dangerous than driving on-road, but too many people don’t consciously realize this when they are in the act of doing so. It’s not their first instinct to be doublely on-guard when driving off-road, but rather their first reaction is how similar and familiar off-road driving feels like their on-road driving experience. This comes back to being an endemic problem with human judgement. You can drive off the edge of a cliff. you can hit a rock and flip over, your wheels can get stuck in the mud or snow, things like that.
But, when you define a clear path, you grade it for visibility, you surface it for traction, you erect rumble strips or barriers to prevent running off the road, you erect fences to prevent animals and other obstacles from moving onto the road, you define a speed limit for the road. or if the car does run off the road, what collision hazards are there? Are there trees growing too close to the road that are so massive as to be immovable and risk causing a fatal collision? Use break-away light poles and signs, to reduce the risk, and also use bollards. About bollards. Oh, you think if you hit one of those it’s like smashing into immovable concrete? Actually, most of them are designed to bend upon collision to gently absorb the shock, rather than refusing to budge one bit and inflict all collision absorption force on the car itself.
Incidentally, each time you remove a risk factor, you reduce the mental load required to safely drive on a road. For example, by defining a speed limit you eliminate the need for more complex knowledge of physical phenomenon that governs vehicles at high speed that simply doesn’t apply at low speed.
Conversely, each risk factor left in place in the construction of a road increases the mental load required to safely drive on that road. And, as a consequence due to the natural fact of the natural variation of human mental capacity throughout the day, that simply results in increasing the number of accidents that happen on that road. No fences? Any rock on a hill or rolling ball from a neighbor’s yard can just tumble right down into the road, there’s nothing to stop it.
The core cause, the true underlying reason heind motor vehicle incidents. That because the roads we’ve created requires keeping track of an incommensurate number of different possible conditions, we’ve created unnecessary risks for drivers are responsible for causing the incidents they experience.
Water in the road? Is that just an optical illusion or real water? People have driven into huge puddles of water on a hot day thinking it was just an optical illusion. We don’t see it as a clear risk factor that we can’t tell the difference between optical illusions and puddles of water on a hot day, we just assume that what looks like a puddle of water is just an refraction phenomenon of the hot air.
The justification for not building safer roads is obvious. Such roads would be much more expensive to build, and therefore we wouldn’t be able to build nearly as many such roads due to economic limitations. The reach and range of cars would therefore be correspondingly limited. We’d have to structure our society and culture to make do with less roads. Or maybe we could have as many roads, but the cheaper ones would need much more stringent speed limits due to such strict interpretation of risk management. What it comes down to is a philosophical question of how much risk the average person in society is willing to entertain.
But, here’s the key. By contrast, a typical fully automated elevator shaft has all of these safeguards in place. All those saftey bells and whistles add bulk and cost to the elevator shaft, and necessarily limit its useful range compared to the total height of its construction. But, the key at hand is the difference between the decision makers responsible for the design of such a system. Motor vehicle roads are designed by politics of the citizens rather than engineers, and that simply reflects the risk-management decision making of the population at large rather than the best risk managers.
This is markedly obvious when you compare per-capita motor vehicle traffic fatalities across different countries, since different countries can have radically different cultures and, therefore, radically different philosophical approaches to risk. As a response, it is very typical in developing countries to mandate higher minimum driving ages compared to developed countries, the government’s meager attempt to stem the chaos present on the roads. But, in the end, this is all for naught since the overwhelming majority of hazardous drivers are well above the minimum driving age, due to the inherent risk of the poorly developed roads themselves. In the end, taking this all together, the hypothesis made earlier become clear: We experience the of our own making, yet we are blind to the fact that we’ve created it. At a population-wide level, that is… the bummer about this is that it means that we, personally, must also experience the risk other people are willing to make, even when we ourselves od not agree with that level of risk.