Sponsor's Message

Every year, excessive speed and drunk driving kills hundreds of people on our roads (and Prime Ministers racing to rugby games scare a whole lot more). Yet we have, at our fingertips, simple technology that would allow us to force vehicles to observe maximum speed limits by way of automatic governors and in-built breath screening would drastically reduce drink-driving.

Likewise, we're coming up to an election and, instead of logging onto the Net, using a interactive phone system, or just popping down to the local ATM anytime between now and then to register our vote, we all have to go down to a polling booth and make inky marks on a sheet of mashed and masticated tree-flesh.

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Right now we're also experiencing an energy shortage - especially if you live North of the Bombays.

This shortage is so bad that there's talk of inner-city power stations for Auckland and more ugly, dangerous power pylons littered through the centre-north of the North Island.

But, if everyone simply replaced their incandescent light bulbs with modern energy-saving fluro units that are five times as efficient -- a significant amount of the problem would disappear.

These are just some examples of how we're simply ignoring technology that could save huge amounts of money, increase our safety, save our environment and generally improve our lives -- yet we seem slow to embrace such technologies -- why?

In some cases cost is obviously an issue. The costs of setting up an electronic voting system would, for example, be quite high -- but it's not really a cost, it's an investment. Once such a system was in place it could be used for a myriad of other tasks -- and let's not forget that a single referendum costs (from memory) around $8 million.

What about speed-governing cars? Surely that would be hideously expensive?

Well no.

Almost every vehicle made in the past 10 years has an electronic engine management system that would allow the addition of a relatively simple and low-cost device that would ensure that no vehicle was capable of reaching the reckless speeds that seem to claim so many lives on our roads. Likewise, the interfacing of a $80 breath-screening device would also be a fairly trivial task.

But perhaps the biggest and most important thing we could do right now is to heavily subsidise the sale of energy-efficient bulbs.

With the cost of the Kyoto Protocol looming large on the horizon, every watt-hour we save represents fewer carbon-credits we need to purchase. If we made these bulbs as cheap or cheaper than their wasteful incandescent equivalents then I strongly suspect we'd see a significant overall saving in the nation's energy bill.

But don't hold your breath. It seems we're quite happy to dawdle along in the 20th century, watching carnage on the roads, building new gas/oil-fired power plants and standing in the rain outside polling booths every three years.

What good is technology if we can't be bothered to use it to our advantage?

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