Over Technologized

I took a trip over the U.S. Memorial Day holiday to attend a friend's wedding. For the most part, it was uneventful. However, an interesting thing happened when I stopped to fill-up with gasoline. I got out of the car and as I was about to enter my credit card information, the store attendant came out and said that I would be unable to pump gas because "the computer system is down." This wasn't a big imposition, I simply drove to another gas station.

It got me thinking about an event several years back when I stopped in at a local grocery store (a national chain) to pick up some plastic cups for a business exercise I was giving the next day. It was about 2:00AM, and after looking all over the store for the cups, I finally found them and took them to the checkout lane. The store clerk looked at me and stated that it would be approximately 30 minutes before she could check me out because the system was being updated.

This technological world is a real marvel of convenience, responsiveness, and availability. We can email from our phones; take pictures with digital cameras; talk globally from our computers; receive HD television over our fiber-optic cable; carry, view, or listen to thousands of pictures or songs on our iPods; determine our location within a few feet with our global positioning system; and even view the temperature on our watches. Well, we can do all those things if everything works right. But as the two preceding examples indicate, if they don't work right, we may very well just be standing around.

As our world becomes more automated and electronically integrated, one has to wonder what would happen if a "glitch" caused a cascading failure. Of course there are back-ups, redundancies, alternates circuits and paths, so the chance of a catastrophic failure is remote, or so it would seem. Then again, Apollo 13 was a masterpiece of back-ups and redundancies. So was Challenger. So was Columbia. Yet they all failed.

Self-configuring and self-healing systems can help, but what happens if they can't? Or what happens if they are not fast enough? It could be a great plot for a novel. Think what would happen if a large number of these systems failed at once. I am reminded of that 1970 science fiction movie called "Collossus: The Forbin Project," where a super-computer is joined to the grid and it proceeds to take control of all computers in the world. It may be science fiction and it may be far fetched, but so were some of our space failures.