Sometimes I sit and think about all the incredible technology and innovation we now have, and then I look around and wonder whether we have actually made as much progress as the world would like us to believe. We can track our phones, wallets watches, cars, bicycles, pets, and even our luggage with little electronic tags that can tell us where something is within a few meters. Our smart phones are now powerful enough to replace personal computers and traditional cameras. Warehouses can scan millions of barcodes every day. Courier companies know when a parcel has entered a depot, left a depot, gone onto a truck, and been delivered. Airports have automated baggage handling systems processing thousands of bags every hour. Yet airlines still somehow manage to lose your suitcase. Courier companies still deliver parcels to the wrong address. Packages still arrive looking as though somebody used them for forklift practice or even run them through a compactor. Software updates still break things that were working perfectly yesterday. Spam calls somehow still find their way through despite AI supposedly being clever enough to write essays, generate videos, and beat grandmasters at chess. Sometimes it feels like we have built unbelievably sophisticated systems that still manage to fail at surprisingly basic tasks, which is actually where we need them to deliver the most. It also makes me wonder whether technology has genuinely solved most of our problems, or whether it has simply given us far more sophisticated ways of making exactly the same mistakes. There are even moments where the things that fail leave you feeling like things are starting to move backwards instead of forward. We can track a parcel travelling halfway around the world to within a few metres. We can locate our car, our phone, our watch, and even our dog. Yet somehow an airline can still lose a suitcase that never once leaves its own system. The irony is that fifty years ago we accepted these sorts of problems because the technology simply did not exist. Today the technology exists, but the problems often seem exactly the same. We have just become much better at explaining why they happened. Perhaps that is the real lesson. Technology does not eliminate human error. It just gives human error a much more expensive operating system. Or maybe I am being unfair. It just seems strange that in a world capable of landing rockets back onto the launch pad, my suitcase can still disappear somewhere between checking it in and putting it on the same aircraft that I am sitting on.
