Predicting the Ending

 Surprise Endings are Good

Don’t tell me how it ends! We love the surprise of an unpredictable turn in the story. I won’t spoil it for you, but you know what I mean about mind-blowing plot twists in films like Arrival (2016) and The Sixth Sense (1999). Novels and movies with predictable endings are less dramatic and less memorable. 

My wife and I have watched some excellent television series, some of which run for many seasons. One of the genres we binge-watch is the crime-solving type -- especially when the series provides in-depth character development so that we grow to love the personality and quirks of the investigators. We often watch the program on Netflix well after it has aired on live television. Watching shows later has advantages. You can check reviews to ensure the series ran multiple seasons and was highly rated. The disadvantage is the risk of coming across a spoiler that gives away a plot twist.

We were a few seasons into watching a particularly good series -- far enough that we had come to know and love the main characters. One day my wife was having lunch with her talkative mother and mentioned this series. My mother-in-law then blurted out, “oh, is that the one where Detective X’s wife is killed?”  We were not up to that season. We didn’t know. We could never have predicted the writers would kill off this character. To her credit, my wife kept this particularly heart-wrenching twist to herself as we continued watching. She only told me that her mom had given away a crucial plot twist, but she didn’t divulge any further details. We didn’t reach that gut-wrenching episode until much later. It was only then that my wife pointed out the unexpected twist that her mother had given away previously.

Television crime series are not the only entertainment with unpredictable twists. In the 1980s, a popular children’s book series called “Choose Your Own Adventure” invited the reader to make a choice at the end of every couple of pages. Each decision sent them to a page number in a different part of the book, where the story would continue based on their choice. After a few more pages, another choice would be presented and the story would again fork into different paths. Eventually, the selected story path would reach a conclusion, sometimes a happy ending of the protagonist, and sometimes an unfortunate end. It was usually difficult to anticipate the consequences of the early choices to choose the path to the happy ending. 

An early computer game, The Oregon Trail, was similarly challenging. Originally text-based, many of the choices one made would result in progress for your frontier party to make its way to Oregon. However, the game could end short of that goal somewhat unpredictably. You could take an innocent drink from a cool stream and fall ill from dysentery. You could suddenly get bitten by a colorful snake and die of poisonous venom. 

Fictional stories are more dramatic and compelling with some good plot twists, however, as a society, we prefer stability and reliability.

Surprise Endings are Bad

We generally do not like surprises from our tools, since unexpected behavior usually indicates a failure. Technological products that fail often result in disgruntled customers demanding refunds and posting unfavorable reviews. Technological product failures that harm people or property often result in lawsuits and unfavorable publicity. However, while engineers can prepare for some potential issues, it is impossible to anticipate every possible situation.

On January 28, 1986, I was a student driving home after a class at Calvin College when I heard it on the radio. The space shuttle Challenger had exploded. In the coming hours, we learned that the seven astronauts aboard the spacecraft had been killed. In the coming months, it became clear that O-rings on the booster rockets were not sufficiently reliable at the cold temperatures of that launch morning. Their failure resulted in the infamous explosion. (The figure on the right shows a diagram locating the O-rings within the booster system.)

On September 11, 2001, I was an engineering professor preparing for my next lecture when I got a call to turn on the television. The Twin Towers had been struck. In the hours that followed, I watched in horror along with millions of others, gasping as one tower and then the other collapsed, killing thousands. In the coming months, it became clear that the towers withstood the initial shock of an aircraft strike. However, the intense heat of flames fed by jet fuel caused the steel structure of the building to fail, resulting in the horrific collapse of both towers.

Technological failure is a surprise ending that engineers work hard to avoid. Engineers are called to hold public safety as the paramount goal in their design work. Ensuring that a technological product is safe requires sufficient analysis and testing so that users can be confident the product will not fail under normal use. Users expect it will not fail after repeated use, over a reasonably long time. They even expect it will not fail after abnormal use, at least to some extent. 

The space shuttle O-rings were not meant to operate in frigid temperatures and were only tested down to a temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The decision to launch the vehicle outside of its specified operating range was a fateful choice, resulting in catastrophic failure. 

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were designed according to best practices of the time and thus built to withstand the stresses of extreme weather. The terrorists’ fateful decision to smash into the buildings with fuel-laden aircraft forced the buildings outside of their specified operating conditions, resulting in catastrophic failure. 

Engineers who seek to put their faith into practice should see product safety as paramount, in part because we are commanded to love our neighbor. Whether designing smartphones or space shuttles, whether designing ice scrapers or skyscrapers, engineers have a responsibility to ensure their designs are safe. However, the extent of their responsibility is not infinite. Engineers must anticipate and design against many possible future scenarios, but not to anticipate all possible outcomes and certainly not operating conditions that are reasonably believed to be impossible.

No design is ever completely safe. It is not possible to develop a product that is guaranteed to cause no harm under any condition. At some point, the added effort and cost to improve safety produces diminishing returns. A product must be reasonably safe, even very safe. But there are reasons an engineer might be justified in declining to build in further safety features once a certain threshold is reached. Adding safety features may unacceptably reduce product usability, e.g., enclosing a hammer with rubber foam would prevent many accidental injuries, but the hammer would no longer be functional. Adding safety features may increase the cost of the product beyond what most can afford. Adding safety features is not always a net gain -- in some cases improving safety in one element is a trade-off that reduces safety in a different element of the same system. 

Trade-offs are inherent in engineering design.  Another constraint we face while attempting to design tools with high utility and high safety is the limited availability of resources, including raw materials and energy. Engineers putting faith into practice should also see stewardship of creation as part of their calling.

Even with the smartest designs that anticipate many failure modes, provide safety mechanisms, and are well tested, things can go wrong. Unanticipated consequences can never be fully eliminated. Sometimes the surprise endings are bad.

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? 

Sometimes technology fails us in ways that no one could foresee. Who do we blame when the designer, manufacturer, and maintainer all did their jobs right and yet something still goes wrong? We do not blame, we mourn. We lament our human frailty, our inadequate wisdom, and paltry imagination. Though we are fearfully and wonderfully made, yet we are finite creatures of dust. We are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. We are not God.

Sometimes technology fails us because of corruption, negligence, or malice. When preventable failures cause harm, we can sometimes blame engineers for the foreseeable flaws in their designs. Sometimes the design is correct and robust, but it is manufactured or maintained poorly. We might then blame the manufacturer or the maintenance service for the resulting harm.

We blame, but we also mourn. We lament our human fallenness, the weakness of human flesh. This is not the way it was supposed to be. In the beginning, the creation, including humanity, was good.  It was characterized by shalom, a flourishing peace.  Though we were made good, sin has stained us and all creation.

Our mourning might lead us to despair. Despair might lead us to anger. In our anger, we might reason that while humans might be prone to failure and corruption, God is not. God is ultimately in control. God is good, all-knowing, and all-powerful.  Why, then, does God let evil persist?  

Asking the question is already a hint at the answer. Only a creature granted the gift of free will would be in a position to consider asking. God made humans his last and best creature on the sixth day of his creating. Unlike any other creature, he made humans in his image. Unlike any other creature, he gave Adam and Eve the power to make a moral choice. Of all the fruit-bearing trees in the garden, humans were forbidden from eating food of only one. Our collective fateful choice to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an act of free will. 

God surely knew that we would choose foolishly. God surely knew that all creation would suffer as a result. God surely knew he would sacrifice his only son to redeem the fallen creation. God had the power to prevent all that, yet he chose to make us humans, not robots, even at such a terrible cost. If God could create any number of possible worlds, and he foreknew how each would turn out, why would he choose one that he knew included the fall of humankind? Asking the question is already a hint at the answer. If God determined that man should not sin, then creating a world without the possibility of sin would imply that he did not give humans a true choice. Of all the wondrous aspects of creation, God’s endowment of humans with free will was perhaps his greatest creative act. 

The God-given ability of humans to make a moral choice is truly astounding. Consider how our most advanced Artificial Intelligence is still simply a set of algorithms and state machines that carry out computations according to the rules we dictate. Machines that think can only do what we tell them to do. Any apparent choices they make are simply randomized or purely determined by our program driven by the inputs we provide. I can imagine how to write complex software so that a computer recognizes images better than I can myself. I can imagine that one could construct a computer system that plays chess better than a grandmaster or a system that gives a more accurate analysis of medical conditions than a human medical expert. Computers can be designed to do many things. But I cannot imagine how to endow a computer with free will. Such a feat is beyond my comprehension. 

Despite the cost, I suspect that our good, all-powerful, all-knowing God gave us the gift of moral choice to make us fully human. God did not bring evil to the world, but he allowed humans to choose evil. God granted humans the ability to decide to turn from him in disobedience. 

Nevertheless, when evil harms us, God grieves for us and turns it to our good. Already in Genesis, we see this pattern again and again. Joseph’s brothers chose evil and sold him into slavery. Yet God used this situation to raise Joseph to be the highest official in Egypt next to Pharaoh. Joseph later assured his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. “ (Genesis 50:20) God’s plan included miraculous dreams for Pharaoh that Joseph interpreted as a prophecy about the future seven years of abundance and then seven years of famine. It also incorporated technology, as Joseph directed surplus food to be collected in each city, preserved in storehouses against the coming years of famine.

Harm can come from natural disasters such as famine. It can also come from failures in our technology. Engineers should work diligently to design technology to be as safe and reliable as we reasonably can. Those that use technology should be able to trust it -- conditionally. However, no one should ultimately rely on technology or people. Our ultimate trust should be in God. In this world, he will turn evil to our good, and in the next world, ultimately, he will wipe away every tear. This is one happy ending we can predict with certainty.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

Do Gadgets Facilitate or Isolate?

Isolate

Modern technology isolates us. Or so we are told. We have all read the stories counseling us to ditch our cell phones so that we can have real relationships with the people around us. We each have our anecdotes of tech isolation, such as a room full of people distracted by technology, when they should instead be having deep, meaningful conversations with each other. It seems like this problem gets worse over time as technology further invades our lives. 

MIT professor Sherry Turkle documents perspective in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, bemoaning the poor substitute that Facebook interactions provide compared to face-to-face conversations. She laments the loss of freedom as social interactions are objectified. Does technology necessarily pull us apart and dampen the very characteristics that make us human?

By nature, humans are relational. We are created to live in fellowship -- in families, neighborhoods, churches, and regions. God calls us to live in harmonious community with our neighbors and to offer hospitality to the stranger. Theologian Colin Gunton goes so far as to say that this relational character is fundamental to our humanity. He notes that we are

“...social beings, so that of both God and man it must be said that they have their being in their personal relatedness:  their free relation-in-otherness…. All things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation. Relationality is thus the transcendental which allows us to learn something of what it is to say that all created people and things are marked by their coming from and returning to the God who is himself, in his essential and inmost being, a being of relation.” 

(Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 229)

If inter-relatedness is key to the created order and inherent to our humanity, then we should indeed be concerned with Turkle’s thesis that technology draws us apart. If Turkle is right, then technology is a problem.

Is Technology the Problem?

Deciding whether technology is harmful is important. Technology is interwoven throughout our society and culture so deeply that it makes it rather difficult to untangle. In 1985, Al Wolters published a short but influential book called Creation Regained that clarifies two possibilities to consider. Wolters claims that “the task of the Christian is to discern structure and direction….structure denotes the ‘essence’ of a creaturely thing, the kind of creature it is by virtue of God's creational law. Direction, by contrast, refers to a sinful deviation from that structural ordinance and renewed conformity to it in Christ.” (Creation Regained, p. 72-73)  

Wolters would have us look at every aspect of our world and apply this bifocal lens, identifying the underlying creational structure and also identifying the corruption of sin that turns that creational good towards evil. Structure is like a magnet that is naturally aligned to attract us to God and toward the good purposes of his creation; direction is the sin that pivots the magnet away from that alignment so that it repels us from the good we should do. The magnet is not the problem. The problem is the direction that we point it. Thus, our next question is whether technology is part of the creational structure or is the sinful misdirection of it.

Technology is the development of natural materials into tools. A hammer is an example of primitive technology that combines wood and iron into a tool that is useful for pounding nails. A smartphone is an example of modern technology that combines metal, glass, plastic, and a host of other materials into a tool that is useful for communicating by voice, email, video, messaging, and more. 

From the beginning, the cultivation and formation of creation was part of God’s calling to us as his stewards (Genesis 1:28). Thus, technology is part of the creational order, part of the structure. Like the magnet, technology can be sinfully turned askew so that it is directed away from God’s intended purposes. As an inherent part of the good creation, technology cannot be inherently evil. However, it might be sinfully directed, and thus we must still consider whether Professor Turkle is right about the harmful effects of technology.

Facilitate

As a counterpoint to Turkle, meet Rutgers Professor Keith Hampton. Like Turkle, he is a professional observer of human nature in the context of technology. He is a people watcher. However, unlike most of us, who might sit at the mall or airport and idly watch people go by, he watches intently. Along with his students, he painstakingly analyzed segments of video recorded over several days at four public locations in New York City, such as the plaza and broad steps in front of the public library. Hampton wondered if technology has interfered with our ability to relate, so looking frame by frame in the video, he analyzed how people interacted with each other. 

Of course, when you want to check whether something has changed, you need to have a basis for your comparison. Hampton carefully selected his four sites because he had video footage of the same spots from thirty years earlier. The NY Times reports on this study (Mark Oppenheimer, “Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All,” New York Times, Jan 17, 2014), which used 38 hours of detailed video recordings of several public spaces in New York in 2008 compared to 1975 (when a previous research project filmed the same locations). Hampton’s team analyzed the interactions of people, to see if the progressively more ubiquitous use of technology had changed human relational behavior over those three decades. For example, mobile phones were invented and had become quite common over this period. Had cellphones made humans more isolated and lonely?  Did humans now tend to focus more on devices while ignoring other people?  Hamptons’s research team found that this was not the case. People were noticeably more interactive with those around them in 2008 than in 1975. 

The Hampton study has its limits. His team analyzed only a few locations during two specific periods of time. Although cellphones had become prevalent over the intervening time between the two samples, the first smartphones appeared in the early 2000s, with the first iPhone coming out in 2007, only a year before the second half of Hampton’s study. Further, it is not possible to do a controlled experiment so that over three decades we isolate changes to a single variable so that technology advances -- but nothing else. Thus, the Hampton experiment cannot give us a true analysis of variance to pin down which societal changes drove the increase in human interaction that he observed. During those decades there were also significant changes in broad sweeps of society, in education, politics, work, family life, and more. But surely technology was one of the most significant changes that also indirectly changed the nature of many other areas of society. Hampton’s study gives us at least some hint that technology is not inherently an isolator. Our need for relationships naturally leads us to adapt technology creatively so that it enhances our relationships. 

When used appropriately, technology can be used to enhance our relationships with others, allowing our communication to span time and space. Before mobile phones, if you walked into the waiting room of a doctor’s office or the lobby of a hotel, you would also see a spectrum of human interaction. While you might spot clusters of people in conversation, you would also see others sitting alone reading a magazine or newspaper with little notice of those around them. 

Today, newspapers do not seem like technology. But that is only because we have become so familiar with this tool that it no longer appears to be high-tech. Yet it is still tech, including some sophisticated and continent-spanning technologies. The thin paper requires constructing roads into the forest where the right timber is located, lumber harvesting with heavy equipment, long-haul shipping, pulping, and finishing with paper-making. The stories require communication from reporters in the field, word processing by editors, layout, typesetting, and final high-volume printing. As a society, we have gradually moved to online sources of news rather than print. This is not a move to more technology, however, but rather a move from one technology to another.

Whether old or new gadgets, sin can and does direct our technology away from the purposes for which it was ordained by the Creator. However, the structure is still there. A tool designed to communicate ideas has an inherent ability to enhance relationships. Whether reading a newspaper back in the day or viewing a social media post on a smartphone today, readers are not isolating themselves from humanity. On the contrary, they are connecting with the author of the article, reaching across time and space to relate to another person’s thoughts and ideas. While printed pages may seem like a one-way conversation, a book invites the reader to question the premise or extend the idea. A newspaper reader could write a letter to the editor to continue the conversation started in a controversial article. With today’s instant connections, the reader can react and interact with the author in near real-time. 

Today, if you were sitting on the steps of the NYC library surrounded by other visitors, would it be better to have a video conference call with friends, to tell them about your pleasant vista and even show them?  Would it be better to strike up a conversation with a stranger nearby, perhaps making a new friend? Better to sit alone in silent contemplation? Technology can play a part in some of these choices. If we individually and collectively discern wise uses of our gadgets, we can direct these creational structures to align with God’s will for us. By grace, we can recognize how sin bends our technology away from God. By grace we can act as God’s redemptive agents, choosing to use technology in ways that love God and neighbor.