The Golden Hammer

“The Golden Hammer” is the Fifth in a series of works that I call “The Ubiquitous Religion”. It’s just my small reflection of mankind’s dependence, relationships, and reactions to technology and science.

“Golden Hammer” is a term given to anything new that is hailed as a miracle answer to pacify mankind’s needs. More specifically, the term is used to describe those things that may be well suited to solve some problems but are then suggested to be suitable for applications for which they obviously aren’t. Wikipedia has this to say about golden hammer situations:

“The phrase "When you have a big enough hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" is similar to the concept of a golden hammer. It is supposed to evoke the mental image of a child who has obtained its first hammer and a few nails. Hammering nails provides lots of fun, and when the nails run out, everything else starts to "look like a nail"”

While this term is aplicable to just about anything, this hammer is meant to convey a caviat of placing too much faith in any technology that may be too good to be true. The word on the hammer itself is the greek word τεχνολογία (technologi) which literally translates to techne [τέχνη] "craft" and logia [λογία] "saying.". It’s also importaint to note that gold is a soft metal so a real gold hammer would be useless.

A major example in the world of technology would be Artificial Intelligenge. While the progress in the field has continued to changed the world there are places that are better left to the controll of true sentience. For instance, many stories have been told about the follies of allowing a computer to controll things such as national defense and the outcome is almost always bleak. In fact, it may surprise you to know that there has already been a point in history where the facility to think like a human saved an untold number of lives. Just after midnight on Sept. 26, 1983, a Soviet Army Colonel by the name of Stanislav Petrov was on duty when the alarms went off at the bunker at which he was stationed. This was because their computerized early warning system had falsely detected that America had just launched a nuclear offensive against the USSR. It was his decision alone to launch a retaliation but instead he did nothing. When asked about his decision many years afterwards he told the Washington Post "I had a funny feeling in my gut,". His “guess” was based on instinct and the fact that the supposed volley consisted of just five missiles, well under what was expected of an aggressive surprise attack. Had their defensive systems been completely automated, that computer error would have kick started World War III, causing massive casualties and devastation spanning most of the Earth.

The image of the hammer is from ~GK-Stocks: [link]