It’s frustrating when you’re not allowed to use electronic devices during the first and last fifteen minutes of a flight – sometimes much longer. I rather resent having to carry paper reading material, or to stare at the wall in those periods. On today’s flight, they even told us to switch off e-book readers.
E-book readers! Don’t these people realise that the whole point of epaper is that you don’t turn it off: it consumes a minimal amount of power, so that the Kindle can survive a month on a single charge. It has no ‘off’ switch per se, its slide switch simply invoking the “screen saver” mode. This doesn’t change the power consumption by much: it just replaces the on-screen text with pictures, and disables the push buttons.
And the answer is that of course they don’t know this stuff. Why would they? Indeed, it would be absurd to expect a busy cabin attendant to be able to distinguish, say, an ebook reader from a tablet device. If we accept for a moment the shaky premise that electronic devices might interfere with flight navigation systems, then we must accept that the airlines need to ensure that as many as possible of these are swiched off – even those with no off switch to speak of, whose electromagnetic emissions would be difficult to detect at a distance of millimetres.
Of course, this is a safety argument, but much the same applies to security. Even the best of us would struggle to look at a device, look at an interface, and decide whether it is trustworthy. This, it seems to me, is a profound problem. I’m sure evolutionary psychologists could tell us in some detail about the kind of risks we are adapted to evaluate. Although we augment those talents through nurture and education, cyber threats look different every day. Children who have grown up in a digital age will have developed much keener senses for evaluating cyber-goodness than those coming to these things later in life, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking this is purely a generational thing.
People have studied the development of trust, at some length. Although the clues for trusting people seem to be quite well established, we seem to be all over the place in deciding whether to trust an electronic interface – and will tend to do so on the basis of scant evidence. (insert citations here). That doesn’t really bode well for trying to improve the situation. In many ways, the air stewardess’s cautionary approach has much to commend it, but the adoption of computing technology always seems to have been led by a ‘try it and see’ curiosity, and we destroy that at out peril.
