About Blunders

I would not know how things were back in the days, but I would only assume that people were more generous about other people's mistakes. Perhaps it is me who have changed, not the world, but I feel that this thought is worth investigating.

Machines and computers make us treat mistakes as something unforgivable (or unacceptable), because it is unacceptable for machines to be making mistakes. And over time, such standard for machines has slowly spread and influenced our standard of whether certain degree of error is acceptable. At first, machines were introduced to do things that we were not capable of doing in a given amount of time. And perhaps, to complement our ability to overcome blunders we commit. Now it seems like even things we can do are left for machines to do. Sure they can do it faster and possibly more perfectly; and it probably is a good thing. But the problem is not their taking over what we can do. The problem is that their perfectness (error-free performance) has changed the way we treat mistakes or errors. "Small" mistakes are still allowed, but the size of "small" became ever so small. Definitely much smaller than before.

This is a big problem because it is prevalent both on individual level and on societal level. The society we belong to is utterly unhappy when mistakes are made. Financial penalties, etc.