The more technology is supposed to be able to do, the more fragile it becomes. In the old days it took a stick of dynamite or a boulder to stop a train. Today, a tiny technical error can stop all the trains in a big city. In a modern office environment, a single piece of paper stuck in a printer can paralyze an entire workforce for hours. In a hi-tech society everything can collapse as the result of the tiniest unforeseen circumstance.

Newspaper headline: 

“AIRPLANE CRASH CAUSED BY WAYWARD PLANT LOUSE. NO SURVIVORS!”

We’ve had tragic instances of spaceships exploding because of a faulty rubber washer, innocent people killed by missiles guided by a system where a single decimal was computed incorrectly, and nuclear power plants that have had meltdowns because the control panel was unintelligible. When I bought my first car, I could figure out how the motor worked – but those days are over. A modern automobile is full of advanced technology and must be taken to a special garage if something’s wrong. Still, a car is a relatively small, harmless technological system. More problematic are the huge systems used by banks, industries, airlines and the military. Here the risk of catastrophe is great if we lose our comprehensive overview of the task at hand. Countless experts in a huge variety of professions are needed to make these systems function. A wrongly pressed key on a computer keyboard can mean the difference between success and failure for a corporation, or life and death for a population. There’s a saying in the computer world that, “a flawless program is one whose errors have not yet been discovered.” Acknowledging the truth of this statement can give one sleepless nights.
                   Humans will always attempt to make things bigger and more complex. Perhaps we’re approaching the limits of the size of systems we can construct without exposing ourselves to too great a risk. Even common word-processing systems are becoming so extensive that they’re practically impossible to make function flawlessly. With the advent of these great, unstable systems, bravery will be the keyword of the future. A bravery that insures that we are not living in constant fear of the next world war being started by a plant louse.