It’s a standard beginner’s move. Get yourself a new hammer – then look around immediately for a nail. It happens all the time. Become an engineer – look to build a new technology. Learn to program computers – look for an application.

Beginning can be really new – as in no one has ever done this before – or it can simply be your new beginning – as in you’ve owned a half-dozen hammers in your life, and now there’s this here wonderful new one.

It’s human nature. Whenever we have a new capability, we tend to want to take it out for a spin.

It happens to groups, as well. It can be as simple as – got a new car? Let’s all go to the beach. Or for social problems? Let’s look to the new technology to solve them. But how do we figure out when we shouldn’t be looking at technology? When it’s the wrong move?

Cynics would say it’s when the technology never seems to work right … and I think they’re half right. Unfortunately, we may have thrown so much money into the fight, and so much energy, that we just can’t quit. Or can’t admit we’re throwing good money after bad.

But how do we do it in advance? One example involves a friend of mine.

For decades she’s been surrounded by professional geeks. They not only can program everything under the sun, they’ve moved the state of the art along in more than one field. When she needed a little computer help – well, it turned into quite the harrowing proposition.

She had a small business for which she needed to write about five invoices a month. Because these guys were top in their fields, they set up this whole system where she would enter her hours every day for her various clients, and her expenses and her miles and god knows what else. At the end of the month, she was to push a button and out would come her five invoices.

It was the same experience you have when one person writes the appointment in his calendar and the conversation stops, while the other person spends up a minute or more trying to make an entry in their tricked-out PDA. Some jobs are just too simple to muck up with technology.

I began to see if I could come up with an example of how we’ve attempted to solve a big collective social problem with technology, a place where maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. Surprisingly, it only took me a minute. And what’s my entry? Voting.

For decades now – over a half century – we’ve been throwing money at voting machines. I remember seeing those clickety-clack electro-mechanical jobs used around the time of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election in the early 1960’s. 45 years later and we’re asking voting machines to recognize everyone’s physical challenges, as well as accommodate every size and shape of human being coming through the door, every language they speak, every level of literacy.

Let me ask you – how often do we vote? Not so often. It just may be – after all the money, energy and pain we’ve thrown into trying to solve the voting problem with the latest technology, that the very best thing is to declare a technology truce. Let’s go to paper ballots. Let’s organize teams of volunteers that count and re-count and re-count again, in ways that would be simple for lots of people to do, and hard to sabotage, since you’d have to get all those people to go along with it.

Yes, my candidate for abandoning technology is voting … I wonder -- what’s yours?

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.