Rushing Pell Mell

As computers assume ever more complex tasks, the improvements in scale, quality, and speed are highly visible, When computers do make mistakes, however, they are doozies.

Human beings are the final quality control nodes in almost every system, but skilled individuals who can recognize when something that is not on the checklist is going wrong are rare. Auto mechanics don't know how to set the timing with just a light bulb and a wire, they just need to swap out a circuit board. Engineers don't have a feel for logarithms because no one uses a slide rule any more. Accountants don't intuit financial interdependencies from years of working with present-value tables, they just push a button and the answer comes out.

Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen.

As we rush pell-mell into the future, let's pray that the system won't make big mistakes. Soon there will be no one who can fix them or even recognize that mistakes are happening before it's too late. © 2013 Stephen Yuen