Safety in Numbers

I suppose the key takeaway from this week's news is that we are sorely lacking in tech redundancy, judging by the monumental knock-on effects of what really should have been a routine software update. We are really going to learn the hard way that we have have rushed headlong into a compact with the devil, resulting in our total immersion in and dependence on technology we think we own and control, but neither understand fully nor implement properly. You have to remember that the world we live in as we experience it now, was largely framed little more than thirty-five years ago, and came of age just about a decade later than that.

We've moved from  a world where the vast majority of people didn't own a computer or mobile phone; were unaware of the concept of 'online', and still communicated largely via landline, fax and snail-mail: even telex was still in use in the early nineties, and the cutting edge of information gathering was Ceefax, via the TV. This has all happened within a single generation, and the Gadarene charge into this Brave New World has left us incredibly vulnerable both to the idiots who would sell us the snake-oil of poorly designed systems and software in the name of profit, and to the clever ones who exploit the vulnerabilities of those systems, also for profit.

We've left ourselves wide open to be completely done over by often poorly-written, badly-managed software, by the brainless corporate idiots - on the one hand - who control and manage it, and on the other hand by the tech-savvy crooks who will spot and exploit every last weakness in it and create as much havoc as the originators of the damned stuff in the first place. Our main problem is that, having dived into the deep-end of the all-connected world, without understanding even how to swim, and without help or a handy life-belt, we are destined eventually to drown in a sea of failing technology that now underpins most of the First World's economy and life-support systems: we have no backup. Pull the plug, and we crash: collectively, rapidly, painfully and fatally.

I noticed when the news about this global outage broke, that people were asking whether they should go back to using cash - 50% of UK citizens no longer use it - but no-one addressed the simple fact that the vast majority of bricks and mortar retail also relies on the same technologies and software to process cash. There are many, many questions to be answered about all of this, but underpinning this perilous situation we have created for ourselves is one of the oldest aphorisms we use: never put all of your eggs in one basket. Anyone who knows anything about engineering, of whatever stripe, knows that for the safe operation and maintenance of any system or machine, one has to have multiple redundancy, so whatever it is that - inevitably - fails will fail-safe.