Do you remember an airplane built by McDonnel Douglas called the DC 10 ?
A medium to long range passenger airplane with three engines that could carry up to 380 passengers.
The first one was built in the late 1960’s, the last one in the early 1980’s and although the design of the DC 10 is 50 years old some of these airplanes are still in use as cargo planes.
One day in the past a pilot was met.
He was flying the DC 10 for more than 10 years.
This pilot was asked if it was not boring to fly the same airplane for so many years.
This, he explained, was a completely wrong presumption.
It was not boring at all to fly the DC 10.
Because, the pilot explained, on every flight he discovered something new about this airplane.
Wow!
Even after 10 years and countless hours still discovering new things of an airplane!
Pretty amazing!
It brought up the question if then anybody in the world knows literally everything of this complex machine.
Or is it a man made machine so complex that nobody knows everything about it?
That for each aspect of the DC 10 a specialist knows everything but that no specialist knows everything of all aspects?
If a machine can be made so complex, one may wonder who is the master and who is the tool.
If there is a problem and the aspect-specialist is not available, it is the machine that is in control.
But most of all we may wonder how much a pilot actually knows about the workings of his or her plane.
Is it 60 % or 20 % or 80 %?
This is part of the evolution of mankind.
Human beings used to make tools that were simple, helpful and easy to fix.
Machines with a limited amount of aspects.
Most people could understand the workings and therefore when there was a problem, repairing was easy.
We don’t need to go to the Stone Age to find examples of this fact.
Let’s take cars.
The French produced a car called the Citroen 2CV.
Built from 1948 to 1990, it had a two cylinder air cooled engine of the most simple technology.
Therefore very few aspects to it.
If it broke down, it could be fixed with the tool box you have in your garage.
But in 2008, Citroen made a car called the C4 with a computer controlled gasoline engine of 1.6 liter and 16 valves.
Complex as hell: in case of a break down, no tool box from the garage was of any help.
More and more complexity means more and more dependency.
And guess what, we do this to ourselves.
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In a city like Amsterdam, that is very old, history can be seen from the way houses were build.
Each epoch had its own style of architecture.
Buy another force imposed its presence on houses in Amsterdam.
Not related to fashion, taste and culture.
The technical revolutions that washed over the city.
Like in the houses build in the 1800's.
At the time, electrical light didn't exist in buildings.
Houses were lighted by natural gas.
Like the Coleman lamp used for camping now: a socket into which natural gas is blown and lighted.
In houses pipes were guided to the ceiling from which gas lamps were hanging.
And in some houses in Amsterdam those pipes for natural gas can still be seen.
And one can see that electricity came to the houses later.
The metal pipes in which were the wires covered by cotton were put on the walls later.
Not inside the walls during the construction of the house like in more modern buildings.
History can also be seen in Amsterdam houses from the way they were heated.
Originally people used stoves and therefore needed chimneys and fireplaces.
This system for heating was used even in the 1930's and 1940's.
Only after the Second World War central heating was introduced and chimney's and smoke canals were not needed anymore.
Therefore one can see in rooms in older Amsterdam houses the locations where the heaters once were put.
Like in the house currently used.
In the large living room two chimney canals can be seen and the two openings for coal or gas heaters.
Some day even the central heating and its radiators may not be needed anymore.
And what about the electrical light as we know now?
Maybe a house in the future has heat and light radiating from the walls and ceiling.
You may laugh.
As they did when electricity was introduced for the first time...
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Right above the bed on the ceiling in the Fuso Szulc a small clock is mounted.
So that the person laying in bed can see what is the time.
And the date and the temperature.
Then, this morning the conversation developed that we see the time on a digital clock while we have no clue how technically the device works.
And that this goes for many machines, tools and gadgets we use in these modern times.
Somehow the time is shown on a display.
Somehow an iPod contains hours of music.
Somehow a digital camera shoots brilliant pictures that are in focus and bright of colour.
Somehow a software program on a computer changes a tilted landscape to being exactly horizontal.
There has been a time that people knew how things worked.
But that is long ago.
Now, a simple non-technical person is surrounded day and night by machines of which the working is not understood.
Some years ago a nuclear power plant was photographed in Japan.
More particularly the activities of one nuclear engineer who worked in the control room.
It was amazing to hear him say that not one person in the nuclear power plant was completely aware how it was working.
Every engineer knew only a part of how the nuclear power plant worked.
And this may be the characteristic of the advancing technology.
It is becoming more and more independent.
An entity by itself.
Created by humans but having become that complex that everybody experiences that it works but that less and less people know how it works.
Science fiction writers have predicted long time ago that eventually technology will become our master.
And we humans their servants and slaves.
But one thing we know for sure.
No machine ever can write a blog like this.
