On November 19, 2011, a single circuit board inside a computer router in Salt Lake City failed. The glitch cascaded, preventing air traffic control computers nationwide from communicating. Hundreds of flights were cancelled.
On May 6, 2010, The Dow Jones industrial average inexplicably plummeted almost 1,000 points in minutes, only to mysteriously rise before the day ended. had the “flash crash” not reversed itself, a global financial meltdown would have ensued.
We humans have linked our destinies with our machines. Our technology has gotten so complex that we no longer can understand it or fully control it. We have entered the Age of Entanglement.
When humans lived in the jungle, they thought that nature’s displays arouse from mystical qualities. In the Dark Ages humans blamed the gods for causing unforeseen events that altered people’s lives. But the Enlightenment brought reason to bear; scientific analysis made sense of more and more of the world. We began to feel in control, and our understanding gave us the power to construct our complex environment of technology.
The Internet is a case in point. Most people may nit realize that they depend on the Internet when they place a telephone call or fly an airplane. In our intertwined world, it is increasingly difficult to understand the very systems we have built or how to repair them. Weeks after the financial crush, regulators installed new trading circuit breakers they hoped would prevent another collapse, but they can’t be certain the fixes will actually work.
Back in 20th century, programmers could tell a computer exactly what to do. They exercised absolute control in a system they completely understood. Today programmers link complicated modules developed by others, without fully knowing how the pieces function. A program, that, say, directs trucks to restock stores needs to find the locations of the trucks and warehouses, maps of the streets and the inventories of stores. The program follows this information by connecting to other programs via Internet. It might also support systems that truck packages, pay drivers and track truck maintenance.
Expand the picture to include factories and power plants, as well as salespeople, advertisers, insurers, regulators, and stock traders, and you begin to see the entangled system behind so many daily decisions.Although we created it, we did not exactly design it. It evolved. We are now dependent on it and not entirely in command.Each expert knows a piece of the puzzle, but the big picture is too big to comprehend.