Fragile Technology is about the inherent weaknesses in today’s technology – and the technology of tomorrow. Our society, and our world, rely on a complex environment of inter-connecting systems, the chaos theory to the ultimate degree. A action in one country, leads to failure in another otherwise unrelated location. One person’s screw-up can bring down a company or a government. And presiding over the decisions which crucially affect how technology works is inevitably someone who has absolutely no idea how it works, or understanding of how their choices will impact the future.
Self-interest, ignorance, corruption and incompetence dominate decisions; and systems fail and people die as a result. A programmer takes a lunchbreak and half the United States is without electricity. A computer glitch freezes trading on one of the busiest days for the London Stock Exchange. A Philipino woman wins a million dollars on a television game show because a technician plugs the wrong cable into the wrong computer screen.
An electricity supply dip to a pharmacutical company’s datacentre results in 4,700 patients being given either the wrong medicine or incorrect dosage instructions. A ambulance dispatch management system which ‘appeared to ignore the basic tenets for software’ fails for 36 hours and is blamed for ten to twenty deaths.
From the sublime, to the ridiculous, to the gut wrenchingly terrifying calamity of accidental nuclear annihilation, our entire lives are controlled, managed, serviced and supplied by technology which 99.999% of the population has absolutely no understanding of. We blindly subvert ourselves to electronic systems, which, literally in some cases, keep us alive. Yet how many people know how to turn on call waiting? The old joke of asking an eight year old to program the video recorder has worn thin – because we were making it 30 years ago, and still are today.
Our collective community comprehension of the technology which governs our lives has not advanced one iota. Yet the technology has become more pervasive, more endemic – and more in control.
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