Entry for January 28, 2009

with the news of the world so dismal of late, you know

• Global Financial Meltdown
• Global Climate Change
• Iran rumored to be on verge having nuclear weapon this year and demand the U.S. "apologize to the Iranian nation and try to compensate for the . . . murderous crimes which they have committed against" it.

I thought I would simply take it easy and not read or watch any news today. But murderous crimes?? I had to look into this .

Specifically the 1953 U.S.-backed overthrow of democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh; Washington's support of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war; and the 1988 downing of a civilian airliner by a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf, which killed 290.

Ah yes, the Iranian airliner fiasco.
After I looked it up to refresh my memory, I found that an after the fact study by the Navy found that the Aegis weapon system that shot down the plane had reported the incoming aircraft as a fighter jet. Even though the crew thought the computer was wrong, 18 sailors and their officers decided to go with the computer; the assumption was it must be right. More scary is the fact that the Aegis system can be set in a completely automated mode, in which humans play no significant role at all.

Allowing people to become so judgment dependent on machines is a real problem that many people either are unaware of or worse, dismissive of.

I work with technology all day, and am continually amazed how reliant people become on technology. Example:
The other day, a machine that has 3 rather powerful computers inside its frame to control all the servo motors that control it during production, and communicate with the production control system in the server room simply, failed. It ran at full production, then started slowing down, then just stopped; the production system sense the failure and "told" the machine to resume production. Production floor people, getting angry because the machine wasn't doing what it was supposed to, started beating on it, pleading with it, as though that would have any outcome other than none. The floor supervisor came to my office and asked why this new machine was doing this...to her utter surprise, i calmly looked at her and said "because its a machine, and machines break sometimes".
The shock on her face was scary to me...because I always assume machines are prone to fail at some point or another, including (maybe especially) computers. Computers are only as reliable as their design, construction and programming. The machine that quit had a faulty sensor, which one of its computers detected, and reported to the central control computer; when the response was no problem keep going , the two computers sent conflicting commands back and forth until it caused a motor to blow a fuse..I know, too techie...

The point is (or should be) that had the sailors in 1988 realized that human intelligence was right, they could have stopped a computer driven system from killing people.