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- Things are getting too complicated, and we are moving too fast. When I was 26 years old stationed in South Ruislip,, England, my job had responsibility for the red phone that was on the desk of Prime Minister Wilson, 10 Downing Street. When the phone was picked up the red phones rang in Washington and Moscow. The system was designed to prevent a nuclear war, by mistake. If any incident occurred the three leaders could double check with each other before launching defensive missiles.
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-. The system was encrypted and had quadruple redundancy in the hardware and in the lines of communications. My responsibility was preventive maintenance, making sure all four systems were working and the encryption being sound.
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-. These were serious times and smart people had thought through possible events and implemented backups and redundancies at every corner. “What if’s” were compensated for.
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-. May 6, 2010, the New York Stock Exchange suffered a “flash crash” with the DOW plunging 1,000 points in just minutes. This was bordering on financial collapse. If it had lasted longer it could have caused a global financial meltdown. I have never heard a good explanations as to why the computers failed. Have we learned to put backup systems in place?
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- A similar scenario has occurred with air-traffic control computers November 19, 2009, a router in Salt Lake City failed and computers nationwide were off the air. Airplanes were on “visual” while someone was replacing single circuit boards in a computer somewhere.
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-. We have linked our destinies to technology The Internet has interwoven our world.
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-. When I was an engineer at Hewlett- Packard, Palo Alto, we had 3 proto-type runs for a new product built by R&D, then, 3 pilot-runs built by production technicians, then, 3 production-runs that went into environmental test. Today the product is launched after the first prototype and let the market do the testing. That is not too dangerous if the product just listens to iTunes, But, when will the automobile crashes have been caused by a software or computer failure that has not had environmental testing? Too soon automobiles will be computer chips with wheels.
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-. Our Congress passed a 350,000 word health insurance plan into law that nobody, including the president, had read. The chair of the health planning committee admitted that even if he had read it he could not understand it because it was all written in legalese. How can we pass laws that we do not understand.
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-. When I was working with HP software programmers they had responsibility for the “entire product” all the way to customer satisfaction. Today programmers link complicated modules together without understanding how the other pieces even function. The program that directs trucks to restock stores uses GPS to locate trucks and warehouses, links to the street maps, links to store inventories, links to tracking packages, links to pay the truck drivers, links to truck maintenance logs. The Internet being the primary linker. Now connect this to factories, power plants, salespeople, advertisers, insurers, regulators, stock traders and hackers, and, you begin to see how complicated things get
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-. Some smart people need to think this through and design some backup systems, some redundancies, some fail-safes. We need some redundant communication systems in key places that are independent of one Internet.
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-. When the phone lines went down from the general's hospital bed in France and he could not reach NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau because some farmer plowed through the underground cable, a staff sergeant set up a ham radio link from the hospital bed to the Air Force Base which in turn relayed to the switchboard to get communications back to headquarters. The general had to be taught how to say “over“. We had a backup plan.
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-. We need to control our technologies to have a backup if we don't our technologies will control us when we least expect it. Science needs to up its game and come up to this challenge. Education needs to teach the young scientists who will be the doers to control this technology. Can our society possibly learn fast enough to keep from destroying itself in the meantime?
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RSVP, with comments, suggestions, corrections. Index of reviews available ---
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---- www.twitter.com , --- 707-536-3272 ---- Wednesday, January 22, 2014 ---
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