Not How This Works...

Remember "Where's the beef?"  If you lived through the 1980's, I'll bet you do.  Since the advent of television and radio, commercials have become part and parcel of our cultural dialogue.  With so many special channels and a vast array of different niche markets, perhaps commercials are one of the few things that unite our postmodern experience, which is a shame, because most of them are stupid.
Some of the commercials have even begun to reference the stupidity of commercials in general.  The direct TV ads that employ various absurd chains of causation to encourage you to switch from cable.  They let you in on the joke, rather than simply insulting your intelligence, and thus you feel more inclined to buy their pitch with little or no data to back up their claims.
One of my favorite commercials on TV right now is for some insurance company (I can't even remember which one right now, even though I can virtually the whole commercial verbatim, soyouknow, maybe not great as an actual advertisement), which has streamlined their quote process down to seven minutes, which halves the "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance."  The particular one that I'm talking about is several older ladies sitting around listening to one of their friends describe how she is saving time by  posting pictures to her wall, literally her living room wall.  That's kind of funny, because we all know some people (even some not so old people) who have absolutely no idea how facebook even works.  The ladies get into a dispute about whose car insurance quote was faster and the wall poster, says to the other lady, "I unfriend you."  (there's a term facebook is adding to our lexicon "unfriend")
The unfriended lady then says, "That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works."
I have come to love that phrase, I use it with my children all the time.  Example: Cate says, "I want desert!" after not eating her dinner, I say, "That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works."  This morning, Jack didn't want to zip up his coat in the snow and wind, because "the inside of his coat was cold now," you know, from being open to the cold air, to which I respond...
You get the idea.
But I have also been observing for quite some time that a great many people are woefully misinformed about a great many things.  The recent disappearance of that Malaysian airliner exhibits the general ignorance that many people have about the sheer size of the world and the relative capabilities of our technology.  A plane is a large thing, and generally a large thing that we keep pretty close track of, however, if certain things malfunction, one of those large things can simply go bye-bye.  Yes, the Indian Ocean, even though it's one of the smaller oceans, is still an ocean, which means it's a very large body of water, and deep too, with currents.
They'll find it eventually, but it's not going to be a simple thing, you can't just send a submarine to go "looking" most big subs don't have windows.  That's a big example, but we're surrounded by an astounding number of techno-things everyday, which we rely on, which we will be lost without, computers, cell phones, cars, televisions.  Most of us have very little idea about how they work, and forget about being able to fix them if they break down.
Honestly, it's unreasonable to expect that everyone know how everything works, things are just way too complicated.  But 200 or so years ago, your average person knew most of the ins and outs of just about everything they owned.  Granted they owned a lot less, and most of what they owned was not what we would call technologically advanced, but if their plowshare got broken or dull, they knew what to do about it, if they broke a shovel or an ax handle, they knew what to do about it.
Life now, because of all these things we don't know, is much more precarious than we realize.  We are probably a few well-placed malfunctions away from major catastrophe.  People have speculated at various points over the past several decades, about nuclear war, climate change, asteroids from space, artificial intelligence and alien species as the end of the world as we know it.
I wonder if it might not be a much more obvious thing that brings us down: our own ignorance.
Maybe not, maybe our civilization will win the balancing act, maybe we will continue to divide up the tasks well enough that someone, who knows how to fix things, will always be in the right place to prevent things from falling utterly apart.  Maybe we can prevent the self-interest and corruption of our species from blindly hurdling us towards catastrophe, although the "debate" about climate change, and our neglect of our own infrastructure, would seem to indicate that this is already problematic.
Maybe we'll just get lucky and this technology will save us rather than destroy us.
Is that how this works?