Electronic leash needs snapping

What tough jobs those charged with managing our behaviours have. You’d hope we were good at public health by now. It’s damn near eradicated polio and they tell me vaccines alone save a couple of million lives a year.

The fight for the health of the public is never over though. Because there are always nefarious profiteers looking for personal gain – public health be damned.

That doesn’t mean public health can’t win though.

Anyone remember the way we used to smoke? It wasn’t that long ago you could still smoke on aeroplanes. How about that? Lighting a wee fire while hurtling across the skies atop a couple of tonnes of aviation fuel. Go figure.

You know behaviours have changed when something that used to be normal suddenly sticks out like the proverbial.

Just this week I was sitting in traffic when a Commodore pulled up beside me with two blokes puffing away on ciggies in the front seat. Oldschool style. The windows were wound up and the car was so full of smoke that all it needed was a strobe light and we could’ve had a rave. That’s not unusual in itself.

What was unusual was the kids in the back with T-shirts pulled up over their noses, trying to filter out some of the stink that was wafting from dad’s stained goatee.

That was normal when I was young and everyone smoked. These days I wondered if I should call CYF?

Behaviours can change.

Now we just have to take what we did with smokes and do it with cellphones and driving. Just this week the cops were in the media lamenting the number of people they caught in a sting using phones while driving.

South Canterbury road safety co-ordinator Daniel Naude said ‘‘the reality is we know there are people who don’t give safety any thought’’.

If there’s ever been evidence that we’re just stupid monkeys, the cellphone experiment has to be the proof.

We think we’re these free will-laden, autonomous beings making all our own decisions, when really most of us are far more stupid than the genius engineer hired by Big Tech to ensure we stay addicted to our phones.

So desperate are we for that dopamine hit that we can’t even sit a few minutes in the car without picking up our electronic leash and checking in with the nothing that’s happened since our last hit.

I’ve seen ‘em at the lights. Take a look around when you’re stopped in traffic. Loads of people are engaged with their phones and not with the road. It’s mind-boggling if you start paying attention.

There are good laws and then there are laws that are stupid. I can’t help but feel that driver distraction isn’t stupid. But I wonder if so many people are doing it that the majority might be of the opinion it’s harmless.

So there’s your challenge, Big Public Health. Teach us to think and engage with the world again. Because it seems to me like driver distraction is the most real and present danger on our roads at present. In fact, as a motorcyclist on the open road, it terrifies me.

Or maybe I’m just a stupid, barely-evolved ape and the answer lies in removing us from the equation?

If we left out the human and had the device manage the driving we could spend the entire trip scrolling Facebook and writing nasty comments online, and wouldn’t that be a nicer way to spend time than wasting your life piloting a vehicle?