Eric Thompson: Back to the future, stupidly

The days of getting in the car to escape technology are well and truly gone. Photo / Supplied

According to a great deal of television adverts for various gizmos, the future is here, and we've got to buy into it.

I'm not so sure.

You don't have to look too far back into the past, when Arthur C Clark, Patrick Moore and Isaac Asimov were telling us, that by the year 2000, we would be whizzing around the universe either conquering, or colonising, solar systems. Did trying to conquer countries on our own planet, I wonder, distract us?

It's now 2011 and we're certainly not "boldly going where no man has gone before". Instead we spend all our time, inside, bent over either a computer, or the latest electronic gizmo, trying to work out how to turn it on, and then off. The only space we're exploring is cyber space.

What Asimov, and company, didn't take into account is our ability for seriously dumb ideas.

For example - who in their right mind would have wasted time on coming up with the idea of shrink-wrapping vegetables and fruit? For God's sake, they come in their own skin. I recently heard of packaging being sold so that little Jonny's neatly cubed fruit wouldn't turn brown on the way to school. Why not leave it whole until he starts to eat it?

I digress though. As I mentioned above we are spending more and more time trying to comprehend what a gizmo does, let alone the computing power of it, that we are missing out on so much more.

I used like to escape the various geek machines and go for a drive in my car to actually have a physical input into what was about to happen, and make my own decisions and not be told by a microchip what to do.

You can't even do that in a modern car these days as they have enough computing power to probably send a rocket to the moon and back.

Hence the dumbing down of driving skills, and the more cars are programmed to save a driver's butt cheeks when they screw up, the less likely anyone is going to become a better driver.

If I listed every single safety device available in various cars these days the list would fill the rest of this page and some. There are a number of folk out there in safety land who advocated and are mumbling that all vehicles should be festooned with enough gadgets to save the life of even the worst driver.

What they do not appear to comprehend, is that the more you make a car safe, the more drivers will rely on computer chips and airbags to save them from idiotic decisions. And, therefore drive well beyond their capabilities, which in New Zealand is pretty scary, as we can't drive to begin with due to lax testing and no compulsory driver training.

I would bet you anything that if you placed any driver in a car and told him not to wear a seat belt and removed every airbag, ABS, EDS, Traction Control, Anti Skid, Power Distribution and whatever else, they'd be a much more cautious driver.

It's quite simple really; it should up to the driver to be safe rather than the car. I for one would rather share the road with a safe driver in feature-void car, than a skills-void driver in a safe car.