I was watching a car commercial the other night when it occurred to me that driver-less cars are probably the next big technological milestone. Here was a car that could automatically brake in emergency situations no matter what the driver was doing. The commercial showed a couple injured in an accident getting to magically go back in time to avoid the whole episode thanks to their car’s sensors predicting the crash and bringing the vehicle to a stop.
Cool! Just like that I was a driver-less car convert.
But at the same time, it also got me thinking that if we can create such incredible inventions, why do we continue to fail on easy, low-hanging fruit?
Self-driving cars? Great. But why not pollen-resistant paint!
My two cars could be mistaken for a landslide. They’re covered in so much dust, pollen and other assorted detritus that I sometimes lose them in parking lots. I refuse to wash them because I know it won’t last more than 5 minutes. So, I lose my cars and walk around asking people if they have seen something that looks like a boulder or what a cat might have coughed up.
How about passwords that are easy to reset? Ever notice that we’re “supposed” to change our passwords regularly for security reasons, yet the process of doing so is more complicated than buying a house. I think it’s easier to apply for a new identity.
I’ve been trying to reset a password for my personal email that is through a certain company that recently acknowledged a small data breach. Oh, just a measly 1 billion email accounts compromised. Nothing too extensive. Luckily, no one in the history of email has ever sent anything of material value across the web. (Shoot, if I don’t even read my personal email account, who else would? It’s just emails from my aunt telling me to berate my senator about this issue or that.)
Still, like a good soldier, I figured I better change my password. And I figured it would be easy. But while the account is technically through data-breach central, it’s actually managed by someone else. And after bouncing back and forth between their sites — an endless flurry of pages telling me to go here and then log in again — it then tried to tell me my account didn’t actually exist. All the emails from my aunt were apparently just a figment of my imagination. Like I would dream that up!!!
Finally, it sent me to a page where I had to answer a “security challenge” question: “What is your favorite hobby?”
“Hobby?!?” I screamed. “I haven’t had a hobby since I tried out stamp collecting and my mother sent my expensive Moroccan stamps with the water bill!”
At that point I gave up, certain that if I couldn’t get into my own account, no one else could. And then I sat down and wrote this letter: Dear technology engineers, I was watching a car commercial the other night when it occurred to me that driverless …