We have all seen movies where the whole world grinds to a halt due to some crazy situation. Sometimes the reason is giant lizards, sometimes it’s aliens (from space), and sometimes it’s an extremely well-funded terrorist organization. This past week, the world was slowed down due to nothing as interesting or as spectacular as what Hollywood would say. Instead, the culprit was a faulty software program from a single company that somehow got a toehold in major infrastructure worldwide. How boring.
Folks who have read some of my past works probably have an idea on where I stand with technology: it’s advancing too rapidly and is too widespread for our long-term good. I believe this past week shows that. Airplanes were grounded, many computer programs couldn’t function, work was stopped and schedules interrupted. I think it’s worth noting that this situation is different than the recent AT&T in which case the huge data leak was partly due to malicious parties. The Crowdstrike error caused tons of issues from a single bad software update.
How many folks worldwide were affected is surely unknowable. Airplanes were grounded and Microsoft programs were having trouble all over the world. This should be seen as both completely unacceptable and also completely avoidable.
Planes used to fly without computers. Business used to be conducted without computers. Even though technology is so highly integrated in our society, there should never be a reason that the world is halted because of some faulty software. Why isn’t there a back up or bypass in place to avoid these stupid errors? There is nothing wrong with taking a step back and saying “Maybe this is too much.”
The truth of the matter is that the amount of technology we have in our lives is too much. Why do new motor vehicles – especially those with minimal extra features – need to have WiFi connectivity and require software updates? Why does AI need to be in every single new software program, such as PDF readers? Why are analog watches capable of Bluetooth? All of these are unnecessary and should be unwelcome.
As a society, we need to be better at saying no to or at least drawing boundaries for runaway “progress”. In our current day and age, that applies to many modern things and these situations are marked by being out of place (Bridgerton season 3 on Netflix, from what I understand, took a hard left turn from the books with the end result being that the show became real gay in the last two episodes). Focusing on technology, we need to say no to AI reach. We need to draw boundaries for what technologies are available to our children and when. We need to hold every new program and magic fix at arm’s length, with the option to reject or bypass these new systems. That is why I’ll be shopping around for a new radio for my truck – only need an AM/FM tuner, a CD player, and an auxiliary port.
Bayou Observant 