The folks from Planet Money said what I've been thinking all along: that this current crisis couldn't possibly be the fault of any single person or organization. I'm a big fan of the History Channel's episodes of Modern Marvels that examine history's greatest disasters, and it seems that in nearly every case it took a cascade of multiple critical system failures to cause a major disaster. Take the big blackout of ... was it 2003? Whenever it was, (I seem to remember that)it happened because a substation failure in Canada triggered failures across the board, with each successive failure making the entire grid weaker until the whole thing collapsed. There's an interesting article on the subject by Richard Dooling in the Times. Some might say it seems a bit alarmist or paranoid, but I don't think he's calling for the end of technology altogether, just for less blind trust in formulae too complicated for mere humans to handle.
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The folks from Planet Money said what I've been thinking all along: that this current crisis couldn't possibly be the fault of any single person or organization. I'm a big fan of the History Channel's episodes of Modern Marvels that examine history's greatest disasters, and it seems that in nearly every case it took a cascade of multiple critical system failures to cause a major disaster. Take the big blackout of ... was it 2003? Whenever it was, (I seem to remember that)it happened because a substation failure in Canada triggered failures across the board, with each successive failure making the entire grid weaker until the whole thing collapsed.
There's an interesting article on the subject by Richard Dooling in the Times. Some might say it seems a bit alarmist or paranoid, but I don't think he's calling for the end of technology altogether, just for less blind trust in formulae too complicated for mere humans to handle.
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