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If all goes according to plan, in ten years lion’s share of Estonia’s passenger carrying buses should be equipped with alcolocks. Drunk driving will be no more – with driver brains no longer working, a device will decide whether the guy goes to work or not that day.
Police Board thinks this ought to also be the case with cars. Critics deem it a useless bother: an alcolock is expensive, it’s easy to cheat, and the efficiency thus rather low.
Even so: a glance at what the Finns have discovered reveals the lock has been a blessing. Since 2008, a whopping 12,000 cases of tipsy people behind the wheel have been avoided. With alcohol playing a considerable role in traffic accidents, the lock has spared many a Finn alive.
And the lock-easily-cheated notion isn’t pure gold either. Some devices come with cameras which make sure the blower-in-pipe and driver are the same. Thus, technical options are in place. What we have to do is decide.
Still, there is another aspect as pointed out by Ceri Radford, opinion editor at The Telegraph as the discussion surfaced in the UK some years ago. Ms Radford thought there’d be a broader and perhaps weightier issue attached: how large a part of human responsibility are we willing to surrender to technological devices? And: how might this affect human sense of responsibility?
Google grants the chance to set limits to one’s mail account which will not allow a too drunken user to send email: unable to solve a simple problem, better not to write that letter right now. The next step, concluded Ms Radford, would be a fridge which won’t let us eat after 8 pm; a corkscrew that pricks the user’s finger after the second cork; and a credit card which will refuse to work if its user desires to purchase a Dan Brown book. Sure, it would be the person telling his e-mail program, refrigerator, corkscrew and credit card what to do. But responsibility thus delegated will not serve to enhance it but, rather, cuts it down – she said.
In this, the critics are right: locks and bolts are for the animals, people ought to go by law and convictions. A beast knows not how to analyse the possible outcome if its behaviour. But, as evident in traffic accident statistics, neither does a drunken driver. So... why not try a lock on people behaving like beasts?