Part 1, the rough draft, Blog #3

Vincente takes on a much more serious way of explaining his outlooks on technology in the past, and today. While expressing his opinions, he uses very specific detailed examples and situations that show how concerned he is about how deeply technology affects just about everything around us. When Vicente talks about the amount of hours that medical workers work, he compares it to the amount of lives lost due to careless choices or decisions due to the lack of hours of sleep. He argues that those lives could have been saved if the workers were more alert because of more sleep, leading them to make smarter choices. He showed the statistics that for those human error lives lost, equaled to over an “estimated between 44,000 and 98,000 possible preventable deaths”(Vincente, 19). “It kills more people than AIDS (16,516), breast cancer (42,297), and even traffic accidents (43,458)”(Vincente, 19).
While describing a device that could allow humans to check the oil in their car without having to even step foot outside their vehicle, Vincente explains that after each specific, detailed instruction you’d have to follow in order to do so, it would just be easier and less time consuming in the end, to get out and do it normally. His point in that was showing that technology, in most ways, becomes so complex, that all these things it can supposedly make things easier for us, in turn, does just the opposite. It most likely would be harder for one to remember all the buttons to push and the steps to take for one simple gauge to show you your oil line that it would to simply open your hood and pull out the oil stick just as its been done for year, therefore, making it easy to remember. All those buttons and procedures would often lead to frustration in not being able to remember anyhow, making it that most people would just do it that simple way.
One other thing that Vincente describes about technology is commercial aviation. How often do you hear people say: “no, I can’t go there because I’m afraid of riding in vehicles.” Not very often right? Contrasting that, how often do you hear people say: “I’m afraid of flying.” Pretty often right? But why is that? Vincente proves in his writing that obviously one of the leading causes of death in today’s society is traffic accidents, as statistics show above. Not airplane traffic accidents either, car accidents. Yet so many people are afraid or even refuse to fly. Believe it or not, many people would choose to drive a trip across the country in vehicle, taking hours upon hours upon hours, rather than a 2 or 3 hour plan trip. Not only increasing the amount of hours being traveled, but also the risk of an accident occurring. Vincente proves this in his article by saying: “There are usually over 10 million commercial aviation takeoffs and landings each year in the United States, yet the accident rate is typically less than one in a million. For instance, from 1984 to 1996, there was an average of nine fatal accidents per year, leading to an average of 204 deaths” (Vincente, 25).
Vonnegut’s interpretation isn’t entirely different in his book “The Cat’s Cradle,” however, since it’s a story, he just state several facts and statistics to support them. Instead Vonnegut tells a story about a substance called ice-nine created by Dr. Hoenikker, “father” of the atom bomb. Ice-nine, the substance very few know anything about, is something that has the power to destroy the world, and all mankind if not aware what they are dealing with. It is a substance so small that it can fit under a finger nail, yet has the impact to freeze all things that include moisture, to solid ice. Dr. Hoenikker, as we assume, created such a thing with no intentions of destroying anything. However, Hoenikker died, leaving the ice-nine to his children who, unfortunately used the substance to selfishly improve the quality of their own lives, or so they thought at the time. Once the ice-nine is released causing all things, as Dr. Hoenikker had suspected, to be destroyed, we as readers of the story, were left with such questions like these: “ If Dr. Hoenikker knew all the consequences of ice-nine, then why did he still create it?” “If ice-nine could have improved, rather than destroyed, what factors would have made the difference?” “Hadn’t Dr. Hoenikker known enough about his own discovery to know that it was harmful to humans?” (therefore he then wouldn’t have died from it) My opinion is that obviously Dr. Hoenikker had no intensions on dying when he did. I believe that he had no intentions of anything happening the way it did with the discovery he had mad.