Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

installed on the ground, but by means of reference points inscribed on the trackthat allow it to calculate its own speed and that of the cars ahead and todecide, in view of its own program of action, whether it will authorize itself-orforbid itself-to move closer to a colleague. This is the adjustable mobile sector(CMD), Aramis' major innovation: it transfers the notion of sector from theground to the mobile unit and makes it flexible instead of rigid. As each vehiclemoves forward it projects its own danger zones, both ahead and behind-forbiddenzones whose dimensions vary according to the speed of the vehicleand the speed of the adjacent cars."But then how can safety be ma intained? When the cars are far enoughapart, the CMD is enoJgh to discipline them. When they approach zones ofconvergence or divergence, the CMD will be supplemented by a way offeeling bl indly ahead; ultrasound detection will be abandoned as too unreliable,and will be replaced by a system of detection by means of hyperlrequencies,which are much less sensitive to interference from tunnels or time. Ultrasoundechoes will be used only for short distances, tens of centimeters, whenthe cars are movi ng together in a tra in." [no. 7]A technical project always gets more complicated because the engineerswant to reinscribe in it what threatens to interrupt its course.The scriptor, or the engineer who had delegated the driver's job toa closet in VAL, was nevertheless as mistrustful of the closet as of the driver;both are fallible. That is why he had maintained the principle of fixedsectors on the track. The program of action-"Keep your dista nce, don'trun into each other," which the people responsible for automobiles haveso much trouble inscribing in the conditioned reflexes of drivers-wastranscribed by the scriptor into a different one: "Don't enter sector n beforesector N + 1 is free." And this program was itself retranslated for humandrivers into yet another one: "If relay switch in up position, then powersupply to motor on; if relay switch in down position, then power supplyoff." And this one was also transcribed into another, an electrical diagramor software program.But the cascade of such translations, while maintaining safety, abandonsflexibility, and thus ceases to authorize Aramis. Either the principle ofthe flexibly configured train has to be scrapped, or else flexibility has tobe reinscribed, but with no loss of security. Here in a nutshell is all the