On the Rails

One of the interesting things about buzzwords is that they acquire widely-understood, yet completely informal, definitions. My favorite recent example is "guardrails," which has become a shorthand for, effectively, building robust harm-prevention measures into new technologies. Which is interesting, because in the everyday world, that's not what guardrails are designed to do. Consider this post I made about a pickup truck going off the road near where I lived at the time.

The problem wasn't that the guardrails didn't work as designed... it was that an airborne pickup truck was not one of the situations that they'd been designed to contend with. But the guardrails were there; anyone happening by would see them. The point could be made that a new design may have been in order, but it was clear that they had been put in place.

And I think that is somewhat lacking in many of today's discussions of technological guardrails; the difference between inadequate and non-existent guardrails is non-obvious. And so for "guardrails" to be evident, they have to be so obvious as to be intrusive.

I have a set of "kitchen knives" that need to be disposed of. I nearly never used them (in part because they were just that bad), and I've finally gotten around to buying a semi-decent quality knife block with semi-decent quality knives. The "easy" way to dispose of the old knives would be to securely cover their blades in duct tape and throw them away, but I figured it was worth asking about online to find out if there were any better ways. No luck... my question was removed; likely before anyone saw it. The "guardrail" visibly did its job, but did so by presuming that my query was too dangerous for public consumption. Doubtless, there are likely people for whom that's the intended outcome, but it strikes me as overzealous.

And while it's clearer that guardrails are working when they're intrusive, that provides an incentive for people to move to where there are no guardrails. Granted, I'm not going to go searching for a free-speech haven just to ask for a good way to ditch some kitchen utensils, but I doubt that everyone finds their questions as trivial as that one.