Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Chapter 17. The Threat of Technology That Works Well

At the nursing home where my wife used to work there was an old man—an Alzheimer’s patient—who wore an electronic bracelet. An irrepressible sort, he freely wandered the halls from morning to evening. While his whimsical and unpredictable journeying occasionally led him off-limits, no one worried about this; his passage through a forbidden door automatically triggered an alarm, whereupon a staffer routinely set the fellow upon a new course.

The gains in safety and convenience from such an electronic system seem obvious. Of course, as most people realize, there are also risks. What happens when the bracelet or alarm system fails? Or when the patient figures out, accidentally or otherwise, how to neutralize the bracelet? Suddenly the staff’s convenient habit of ignoring him poses an extraordinary danger.

But what if the system continues to work exactly as hoped? Might that possibility pose the greatest danger of all? In particular, do those wrist bracelets, by increasing the efficiency of the nursing home operation, make it an even more inhuman terror for aging folks than it already is? Do family members or neighbors or staff members ever take that old man through the forbidden doors and outside, where he can experience grass, tree, and sun for a few minutes? Or, now that he is so well watched after by technology, do they increasingly forget him?

As important as our dogged pursuit of technical glitches is and will remain, I don’t think ...