The Fragility Of The Digital Age

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The outage is “catastrophic.” So arrived the message from a server that hosts a service that is important to my life.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the world came to an end for a full day until power was restored.

What was the reason?

I don’t know the particulars but it is usually always the same. An update in one software was inconsistent with another. A line of code got through that didn’t work as planned. Some third-party software stopped communicating with the main server. A cascade of effects followed that messed up everyone’s lives.

This is becoming more and more common. Two days earlier, all the servers hosted by Amazon went down. This wrecked countless social sites, financial services, airline reservations, and banks. Whole industries ground to a halt, and for exactly the same reasons.

Everything about the digital age works great until it doesn’t. Neither you nor I can fix it when it does break. We don’t likely know people who can. We are all vulnerable. Our hands are tied. We can only sit and wait for the administrators of the services to kick the machines, tug on the wires, revert the codes, reboot this and that, and otherwise somehow find out what’s wrong.

I was a server administrator in the early days so I have my experiences with outages. You are staring at black screens. So the mind begins to wander. The problem could trace to one of dozens of possible causes. Or maybe hundreds or thousands. Or millions.

The only way to get through it is to be very calm and rational. It’s a process of elimination and that requires disciplined logic. And quiet.

Meanwhile, everyone around you is screaming for a fix. The boss is freaking out. Emails and phone calls are flying everywhere. Online communications are blowing up. It’s like the world is ending. And yet you have to be the clear-headed one, even as the heat is on. When you find out the real issue, it seems perfectly obvious. Then people wonder what took you so long.

Here is the real problem we face. The whole of civilization embraced digital technology as the new shiny object. It seemed like the thing to do. Mostly it worked. But there has been a tremendous neglect of basic principles of engineering such as creating redundancy. When things go wrong, you need a backup plan. In principle, code architects know this. In practice, creating redundancy is the most neglected feature of the digital age, because doing so does not pay the bills.

Think of how centralized the Amazon servers are. Millions of businesses and connections rely on them, and they are mostly very reliable. Indeed, they have a near-perfect record. But the trick is the “near” part. You never know what part will break and when, and what the consequences will be.

The key problem is that the people most affected by breakage are powerless to do anything about it. We are completely at the mercy of the digital masters. And with artificial intelligence (AI) it is even worse. The digital masters are themselves machines that absolutely no one fully understands. When AI starts to break, we are going to rue the day that everyone and his dog threw themselves into this without so much as a thought.

Often I think back to when I was a kid. My brother and I took apart a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Yes, I was too young to participate much but I helped. Every piece of the car was disassembled, reassembled, and put back together again. True, it never really started well after that but you could roll it with your foot and give it a kick.

The point is that we were able to do it. That is not possible these days.

To be sure, that cannot be the whole standard by which we judge technology. The division of labor is real and meritorious. In a market society, we are always going to take advantage of the ability to cooperate with providers of goods and services that we cannot, even in principle, replicate.

That said, surely there is a balance here. Do we really want to live in a world where no one can fix anything? When all the services you need are down and there is no one to call?

Keep in mind that these digital systems control your ability to open your front door, start your car, heat your home, and have access to your money. When they go, you are without a home, transportation, and money. This is a terrifying reality and yet here we are.

More and more, it is not possible even to navigate the world around you without a cellphone. Personally, I cannot stand this. I will always ask for a real menu, use a printed out ticket, and even try to figure out directions to places without the aid of GPS (which is a serious challenge in my case). But doing all of this is essential now that the world is so fragile.

This is hardly my own opinion, by the way. I’m not a lone crank. I’ve spoken at length with top engineers at major companies and universities. They express the same worries. The problem is that no one really knows what to do about it.

Meanwhile, outages are increasing even as systems are growing more complex, thus increasing the intensity of consequences. Our lives are ever more dependent on systems that no one controls. This happened recently at the airport when I had a physical ticket but the system listed me as not having fully checked in. Everyone in charge wanted me on the plane but the gods of technology said no. Guess who won the struggle: the machines. I had to miss my flight, leaving me stranded and missing appointments.

That was only the beginning of the problems on that trip. Every single one of them traced to the same source: technology that was not cooperating with the wishes of the employees and the managers of the system.

Everyone has stories like this. It is getting alarming. You take for granted that something works. Suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, it does not work. You never quite recover your sense of security once you face this.

What can be done? Systems administrators can eschew total dependence on clouds and AI and adopt technology more slowly, building in redundancy at every stage. As consumers, we can be more attentive to preparing for the worst by reducing our reliance on digits. I will always choose analog over digital when possible.

A scene pops into my mind when thinking about this subject. It is the cobbler in my neighborhood who is still repairing shoes with machines made back in the 1920s. These machines have lasted 100 years and still get the job done. Nothing today is built this same way. We are on three-year cycles of buy and throw away. This is not a sign of genuine progress but the way the world ends.

Stock up on silver dimes and firewood. Meet some real farmers. Go back to physical locks. The time could come when you need them.

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