In novel ways, technology just might end up being the death of us

Q. Technically speaking, what are a few rather novel ways of dying these days—some more literal than others? A. If you suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out), you just might be a candidate for death-by-smartphone, as you hear that ding or chirp (“attention magnets”) and just have to know what’s going on, even as you cross a busy intersection, says Paul McFedries in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. Or consider death-by-GPS, so coined by Death Valley National Park rangers, who attested to people following their GPS into the hostile environment of the park and perishing when they ran out of gas and couldn’t get help. And, adds McFedries, “by now the stories of clueless tourists who drive straight into the ocean or go 900 miles in the wrong direction because they mindlessly followed the directions on their GPS devices are legion.”

Then there’s the psychic toll at the workplace, when a program or robot does most of the work and we’re there mostly just to watch. Whether it’s “automation complacency” (a lack of engagement and reduced attention); or “automation bias” (trusting the decisions of automated systems even when they contradict our experiences); or “skill fade” (when our mental and physical proficiency diminishes without ongoing practice), technology is changing the nature and language of work.

It’s a slow death of sorts, not from burnout but from “boreout,” and from the resulting ill health known as “underload syndrome.” Q. What were Christopher Columbus’s beliefs about the Earth which set him apart from his contemporaries? A. The ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round. Indeed, in the 3rd century BCE, Eratosthenes of Cyrene had already made a rather accurate estimate of Earth’s circumference. “By a combination of wishful thinking, selective observations, and a confusion of Roman for Arabic miles, Columbus believed the Earth was a quarter smaller than Eratosthenes had found,” says Tyler Nordgren in “Sun, Moon, Earth: The history of solar eclipses from omens of doom to Einstein and exoplanets.” He also thought the eastward distance from Europe to Asia was much greater than did his contemporaries, leading him to conclude that the open sea westward from Africa to Japan was no more than 2,400 nautical miles — about a quarter of the true distance.

So the beliefs which inspired Columbus’s journey were simply wrong. “By all rights, Columbus should have been sailing out into an ocean spanning over half the planet; it was only by luck that he found the Caribbean approximately where he expected to find the eastern reaches of Asia. It must have been so confusing when nothing he found was as he expected.” Q. Don’t dismiss those wacky math-sters out there who may have an answer for this one: Let’s say your beloved Cleveland Cavaliers are leading by 18 points at halftime. Can you count on them having the game in the bag? A. When Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado and his colleagues analyzed more than a million encounters in basketball, hockey and American football, they found that much of the dynamics of these sporting contests followed a simple model, reported “New Scientist” magazine. “The emergent behavior of these highly trained athletes in a wellregulated environment is basically equivalent to a random number generator.” The probability applied to a lead being “safe” at any given time. For example, for an NBA basketball game lasting 48 minutes, they calculated that “a team with a lead of 18 points halfway through the match will win 90% of the time.” To work out the lead required to be 90% safe for other times in a basketball game, you need “to multiply the square root of the remaining seconds by 0.4602.”

Said Clauset, “This is stunningly accurate considering the model knows almost nothing about the rules of the game (‘Physical Review Letters’).”