Page 15 - The Revolution Will Be Automated

Many problems with technology are caused by its human operators.

Consider Wegman’s bakery in New York state. This cutting-edge business

allows customers to email in the images they want on their cakes, and a

special printer uses food dyes to print the image onto the cake icing.

But what if the image makes no sense? What if the email contains some

unexpected content, like HTML markup?

This happened when a

customer used Microsoft

Outlook to email the desired

text for a cake. The Wegman

employee blindly cut’n’pasted

Happy

Outlook’s added HTML markup

directly to the printer, resulting
Birthday

in the bizarre cake overleaf. Can

we really blame the technology?