John Henry beat the engine, but look where it got him

AL Gore is no John Henry but may lose just the same, trying to use human power to fight the machinery of man.

Stop guessing whose lawyers will be the next president of the United States, and consider the underlying Florida battle of man vs. machine. This fight flares everywhere in America--on student tests, in chess tournaments and in factories--but not since John Henry has the choice felt so unsatisfying and strange.

John Henry and Vice President Al Gore are both quasi-fictional characters driven to win at all costs. Henry was a railroad man who died trying to beat the steam drill with his humble hammer. He won, but broke his heart. Gore is a politician trying to eke out a victory in Florida by getting certain votes recounted by hand instead of by machine. He still may win, but will lose all respect in the process.

The race between Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush has devolved into a legal squabble over the merits of machines and people. Gore attorneys say a hand count is better, because people are better equipped to discern what machines cannot. Bush attorneys say a machine count is better, because people are more prone to bias and mischief.

No wonder the public is staying out of it. Both arguments are true. The public knows by now that we let machines do the thinking for us whenever it is more con- venient to do so. From Big Blue to the SAT, machines' values rise and fall on how much power we give them.

Take smart refrigerators, for example. I can't imagine why it would be worthwhile to program a refrigerator so it could order milk for me. I'd blush if my fridge knew how much tapioca pudding I ate Tuesday night. But the same folks who bring you Palm Pilots are furiously developing this product. They want us to desire a simpler life with appliances trained to think on our behalf.

What is the value of such a machine? Measure how smart it is, divided by how dumb we want to be, multiplied by time.

Then there are standardized tests, embraced during wartime in the mid-20th century to sort the aptitude of incoming soldiers. The president of Harvard University seized upon the tests as a fair way to measure intelligence in young students of all backgrounds, not just Eastern bluebloods with rich daddies. The Scholastic Aptitude Test helped transform the face of higher education.

Today, the fad is to view mechanically scored tests with suspicion. Multiple-choice tests fed into machines cannot fairly discern students' unique abilities, the argument goes. That's partly why the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, the state's new high-stakes test, was exalted for its hand-scoring. No heartless machines here; the tests are lovingly shipped to Iowa for individual grading by hand-selected experts.

Passing the test will be a graduation requirement by 2008, which means lawsuits are inevitable. The test's reliance on humans will be its biggest weakness in court. Lawsuits will allege that human graders, sleepy and teeming with bias, aren't up to the task.

I'm betting such lawsuits would prevail--or at least catalyze a switch back to mechanized scoring. By then, hand-scoring will seem too expensive and inefficient to continue. And by then, computer software designed to "read" essays will be even fancier.

Ambivalence toward machinery is part of American history. Mechanized assembly lines at Ford plants devalued workers but made the automobile more reliable and affordable for the masses. Furniture factories make it unnecessary and inefficient for anyone to know how to build anything, but they also increase the value of hand-crafted tables and chairs.

Voting machines make it far faster and cheaper to count the votes of 100 million people. People trust them, but their trust is not absolute. Experts say these machines can have an error rate of 2 to 5 percent, enough to swing a close election. No wonder so many states, including Texas, allow or require a manual recount when the race is tight.

Voting machines also change public expectations about the election process. The near-instantaneous results that spit out of a machine make anything slower seem suspicious and inferior.

Which brings us to the lawyers, now multiplying during commercials like the brooms in Disney's "Fantasia." The Bush attorneys bemoan the election's length and cry for quick closure. To them, efficiency must rule at all costs.

The Gore attorneys decry the election's crude speed, the thousands of votes chewed up and discarded. To them, every person must be valued and measured at all costs.

Lawyers know there is no moral high ground here, in the age-old battle of man vs. machine. They admit they could make their opponents' arguments just as easily. This is simply a matter of who can win.

And this is why Gore will lose, even if he wins. The push for hand recounts in selected Democratic counties is a last-ditch strategy to outsmart a machine.

Gore forgot that outsmarting political machinery is far riskier than rising above it. He forgot, as John Henry did not, that in the end, a man ain't nothin' but a man.

Susan Nielsen's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is: sunielsen@seattletimes.com.