The assumption that technology eliminates human error is a fallacy: a computer system is programmed by people, and as a result it thinks like people - specifically, the people who programmed it to think in a certain way. So a computer system is merely consistent in its logic, not merely right in its logic. And the one quality it lacks is the ability to think differently.
Thus technology can be rigged to make consistently bad decisions just as readily as it can be rigged to make consistently good ones. And even if its decisions are good at the time it is programmed, the world changes. A computer system programmed ten years ago is doing what made sense ten years ago, which may be different to what makes sense today.
Technology is also limited to those elements that can be quantified and measured, and will ignore any data that seems inconsistent even if it is valid and relevant. This is valuing reliability over validity, and results in a system that is out of touch with reality because it is rigged to ignore the factors that matter most in favor of those that are most easily measured.
The appeal of technology is often to escape the responsibility of judgment. A person who does what a computer tells him is not to blame. He is prevented from thinking for himself, but is merely following orders. And as the computer was programmed according to logic dictated by others, he is not following the orders of the machine but of the person (or committee) who determined how the machine was to be programmed.
In that way, technology also caters to megalomania. The person who programmed the system exercises great power over everyone whose daily activities are dictated by the system for as long as the system is in use. Autocrats enjoy making rules for others to follow, and the ability to do so through the proxy of a computer, to effectively control many others over a long period of time while meanwhile escaping the blame (their bad logic will be the computer's fault) is very attractive to cowardly and manipulative people.
That said, the flaws in the motives and methods of technology should not be used to dismiss it altogether. Technology is very good for some things, particularly when the most valid factors are, in fact, quantifiable and unlikely to change over long periods of time. The data they provide is invaluable to optimizing a process that is repeated frequently in a situation that will not change. The question, which is seldom raised, is whether the real-world phenomenon to which technology is applied actually meets those criteria. Very often, technology is the wrong tool for the job - and almost as often, it is used anyway.
Where the factors that are most influential to outcomes are qualitative, or where the elements and environment are subject to change, technology is a very bad solution - which puts a firm on rails to do the wrong course consistently, and never to discover a different course that would be more successful.
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