by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Common Dreams) July 18, 2024 will go down in history books as an event that shook up the world in a unique way. It gave the mass of humanity a pointed wake-up call about the inherent fragility of the technological systems we’ve created and the societal complexities they’ve engendered. Critical services at hospitals, airports, banks, and government facilities around the world were all suddenly unavailable. We can only imagine what it must have been like to be undergoing treatment in an emergency room at the time with a serious or life-threatening illness.
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So, what are we to make of this event and how can we rationally get our collective arms around its meaning and significance? As a journalist who specializes in writing about the impacts of technology on politics and culture, I would like to share a few initial thoughts.
Given AI’s now critical role in shaping key aspects of our lives and given its very real and fully acknowledged downsides and risks, why was it not even being discussed in the presidential debate?
For some of us who have worked in the tech field for many years, such an event was entirely predictable. This is simply because of three factors: 1) the inherent fragility of computer code, 2) the always present possibility of human error, and 3) the fact that when you build interconnected systems, a vulnerability in one part of the system can easily spread like a contagion to other parts. We see this kind of vulnerability in play daily in terms of a constant outpouring of news stories about hacking, identity theft, and security breaches involving all sorts of companies and institutions. However, none of these isolated events had sufficient scale to engender greater public awareness and alarm until The Great Global Computer Outage of July 18.
Inherent Fragility is Always Present
As impressive as our new digital technologies are, our technocrats and policymakers often seem to lose sight of an important reality. These now massively deployed systems are also quite fragile in the larger scheme of things. Computers and the communications systems that support them—so called virtual systems—can concentrate huge amounts of informational power and control by wielding it like an Archimedean lever to manage the physical world. A cynic could probably argue that we’re now building our civilizational infrastructures on a foundation of sand.
At the recently held Aspen Security Forum, Anne Neuberger—a senior White House cybersecurity expert—noted, “We need to really think about our digital resilience not just in the systems we run but in the globally connected security systems, the risks of consolidation, how we deal with that consolidation and how we ensure that if an incident does occur it can be contained and we can recover quickly.” With all due respect, Ms. Neuberger was simply stating the obvious and not digging deep enough.
Most technocrats don’t have the policy expertise needed to guide critical decision-making at a societal level while, at the same time, our politicians (and yes, sadly, most of our presidential candidates) don’t have the necessary technology expertise.
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