Abstract

On the movie screen and in television commercials, technologies are usu ally portrayed as visions of perfection, their parts seamlessly functioning without a hitch. In real life, however, most technologies are only pretty good or, if excellent, achieve that performance only at great price. Two Florida-based technologies, the space shuttle, symbol of America's techno logical prowess, and the state's voting system, now an icon of technological dysfunction, remind us of the limits of technologies, especially as they are influenced by the American political and economic system. Like the 1986 Challenger explosion in its time, the voting machine fiasco has become an object of intense speculation. How did things go wrong? It might help to consider the differences between space shuttles and voting systems?the first an excellent technology, the second a pretty good one. A pretty good technology works adequately most of the time without major problems or investments, whereas an excellent technology requires significant resources to function properly. (Each shuttle launch demands one to three million person-hours and between four hundred million and eleven hundred million dollars, depending on how you count.) When either technology fails, the results can sometimes be spectacular, truly visi ble disasters.

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