Blog Post #8

When it comes to the stasis theory, it all boils down to four criteria that a paper can follow in their inquiry paper. In the majority of all the excerpts and articles that I’ve read from Carr, they exhibit traits of the value criteria along with the facts section of stasis theory. He uses fact in the form of anecdotes as he opens his chapter with the story of a pilot who did not follow his training in a time of distress, instead he jerked the plane with an unprofessional move after its autopilot shut off, creating factual evidence from an occurrence to be used as fact for his inquiry. After the story, Carr focuses on the value of automation technology to see if it is efficient or desirable enough even though “a single mistake in a cockpit can cost scores of lives” (Carr 46). He questions the value of automation by bringing up studies that were conducted to see the main causes of airplane crashes and they “linked many accidents and near misses to breakdowns of automated systems,” (Carr 55) asking about the true value in the technology by showing how untrustworthy it can be. To help strengthen his argument, Carr slips in pathos to his argument, especially in the beginning by opening with that same story of the plane crash that took the lives of over two hundred people, pulling at the reader’s emotion to feel for those who die in the hands of automation technology. The effect of the story and its death toll causes the reader to question their moral standing about automation, connecting his stasis theory of values to his pathos approach by connecting the moral category of the value of the technology to the reader’s personal feelings and morals. Through all of his techniques to inform and persuade the reader, it all connects to create and ask about the one rhetorical situation present: Are the lives of many people in the hands of automation worth the use of technology such as auto pilot?