by Flemming Funch
Seems to me that a lot of potential problems in the world are there because of technology and systems that only work when everything is going well, and that aren't prepared for things going wrong, or for deliberate misuse. Un-collapsible buildings and un-highjackable planes are certainly technologically possible. But it is generally not how we design things. Too many of our technological constructions have single points of failure. Knock out a few key pieces, and the whole thing tumbles down. Blow up a few supporting pillars and a building falls down. Cut the right cable and millions of people have no TV or electricity. Pull out the plug out of your own computer and, no matter how many millions of transistors it has, they all stop working.
We've gotten very used to it, so you might say: "Of course my computer doesn't run if it has no power". Maybe so, but why should it depend totally on the continuous connection between two tiny pieces of metal in the plug? Why should it become inoperable if you just break that contact for a millisecond?
Nature doesn't work that way. Nature almost never has single points of failure. Cut a branch off a tree and it doesn't stop being a tree. There's no single point of control, or of failure, in natural systems. There's lots of redundancy. If it doesn't work out to do things one way, they'll be done another way. There are multiple pieces taking care of the same functions.
I think we need a totally different way of thinking about constructing things. Not assuming that they'll be operating under ideal conditions, but rather assuming that everything that can go wrong WILL go wrong once in a while. So, we need stuff that keeps working even when things go wrong, even when they're misused and mistreated.
The prevalent paradigm is that we fix things when they go wrong. If your car doesn't run, somebody will look in the engine and find out which part is broken and will put in another one. That's really silly. I want a car that doesn't depend on any one part which might break when I least expect it.
Nature continuously breaks down and rebuilds, but it isn't a problem. That's part of what makes things work. The whole keeps working, even when parts fail.
So, I think we need to build whole things. I think we need to make technology like an anthill, rather than as an ant, as a forest rather than a tree. Meaning, technology built on the principle that it is important that it works, and where there's enough of an ecosystem between the individual pieces that it will keep working even when parts fail.
Our current technology is related to our economics and our systems of governance, I'd suspect. A dysfunctional system where a few will control and profit from the actions of the many, but where the detail outcomes of individual actions don't matter much. It is "good" for the economy that cars break down. Wars are "good" for the economy, because then we can produce a lot more stuff.
But as our technological and economical systems are becoming increasingly inter-connected, and vulnerable to systemic failures, that old way of looking at it makes less and less sense.
Now we discover that we'd actually like a building or an airplane that can't fall down. And we discover that our technological tradition has spent little effort on that kind of thing.
So, it is time for a new age of technology, a new kind of systems.
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