Agility and Disicpline (wax on wax off) (post week 4)

Technology is the be all end all, especially today. We rely so heavily on it that we may as well be the terminator. This is because humans are flawed and slow but technology is quick and reliable, except for when it's not. We learned about the definitions of discipline and agility as they pertain to the living lab study and I feel they are concepts we can apply to our everyday lives tech included. I think they are also fair warnings that just because we can do something doesn't mean it's good for us to do in the grand scheme of things.

Discipline is the ability to operate and we can all do it fairly well. Our bodies operate with individual muscles and organs. Nature operates with each individual species that lives in the world. Technology has many parts that all much work in order for a machine to operate. Everyone can operate and therefore we all have discipline. We all have the ability to form our own thoughts and actions and make our own decisions. We take in information and make a decision to act or not, how to act and go ahead and do it.

Agility is the interoperability of all of the pieces of an equation. A beating heart doesn't do you much good if your lungs don't work. Also being an animal does not help if you don't understand you place on the food chain. A machine is just the sum of it's working parts and programming implemented by humans. Machines are fallible because we ourselves create them. Whether it be that we have designed them wrong, utilized them for the wrong purpose or put a virus on them they fail because of our decisions. Humans also need interoperability to operate. A heart is no good without working lungs because you still will not be able to get oxygen to your body and you will die. We all act and have the ability to act but we must take into account the consequences that our actions will have on others.

We are complex creatures that have the ability to understand how to act we live in a civilized society that works in many parts. When things go well they go great, and our interoperability looks high. When the worst happens like Katrina you see the worst in people. We were bound hands tied by the rules of our society. We spend so much time trying to make sure everything is in its' proper spot and place that we don't realize how far apart we tear ourselves by compartmentalizing every little thing. Our inability to act during Katrina was partly because of individuals themselves not taking the proper precautions but the slow response times we due in large part to our ability to make a machine that works but does not work tongether. It just went to show that the government was like a computer that we were putting together piece by piece. You do need a motherboard (DHS), and you do need a hard drive (CIA), also ram (FBI) and insert whatever other three letter association and computer part you want to fill out the metaphor. A computer works because they all speak the same language we didn't work well in the case of Katrina because we didn't all speak the same language.

We had a bunch of parts of a computer that were not sharing information because they were not supposed to or it wasn't the proper sequence of events to make them too. Basically we blue screened when people needed us the most. Instead of looking state of the art we looked like and original home computer that could only work on a floppy drive of info when we needed to be able to compute and make sense of a terabyte. There are times when we need to say screw the formalities and the compartmentalized system and just go out there and do what needs to be done, laws be damned and procedure be damned. We had the ability to act we just didn't have the ability to communicate with each other. We need to get all of our files in one place, all of us be speaking the same language and all of us work together in order to make sure this never happens again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll I know all of these aren't recent or completely preventable but imagine what we could all do in working together to lower the response time and save more people. Interoperability is the future I hope and I am going to keep using this term like a businessman uses the word synergy