Several effects of complexity compound human errors within networked computing and communication, increasing the disorder of human society. In time, the interlinkages among computers and people will inevitably become increasingly error laden amounting to serious proportion of the content in any channel (as an accumulating and published expression of various other dysfunctions) propagating seriously destructive impacts upon the smooth transactions within the society within which they have been placed. All this happens with the good-hearted intention of producing improvements in data integration, utility, speed, and economy. This is a predictable, inherent, and inevitable factorial dysfunction. Here are only a few of the ways chaos overwhelms us.
Several effects of complexity compound human errors within networked computing and communication, increasing the disorder of human society. In time, the interlinkages among computers and people will inevitably become increasingly error laden amounting to serious proportion of the content in any channel (as an accumulating and published expression of various other dysfunctions) propagating seriously destructive impacts upon the smooth transactions within the society within which they have been placed. All this happens with the good-hearted intention of producing improvements in data integration, utility, speed, and economy. This is a predictable, inherent, and inevitable factorial dysfunction. Here are only a few of the ways chaos overwhelms us.
1. The combination of some predictable (and constant) factor of irreducible human error, or gray-out’s will never go away unless we do, and we will always be in denial.
2. Communication error (that broadcasts errors without error-checking, or when the error-checking data base includes the error) is mostly detected after the fact, when the damage is done and it is too late because the errors created have already been broadcasted.
3. Network malfunctions range from nanoseconds to months. We notice the long ones most of the time, and depend on our (error-laden) technical systems to detect the brief ones, and to correct them.
4. Time is our enemy. Timing errors cause information to be entered too late or arrive too late. We see garbled output, or we may fail to notice it.
5. Natural rates of data corruption may be caused by cosmic ray media damage, write-errors, read-errors, media decay, system crashes and time-outs, brown-out’s, and power failures.
Despite the fact that these are inherent, inevitable, predictable, agglomerating dysfunctions, they cannot be cured or prevented by mathematical or computational error checking programs because the error checkers begin to contain corruption. This is so because the human errors that are compounded into the larger system, along with the random errors within the larger universe of hardware and software (there now exist far more data (measurable in bits and bytes) than all the accumulated individuals in all human populations in all of history) are the kinds of errors where the misuse or misinterpretation of otherwise true facts will remain un-detectable by computers and all but a few people. These kinds of errors are also far too complex and extensive, and expand too rapidly, to ever be rooted out by human effort. In this way, the accidental genius that results from the combinatorial dysfunctions and errors could probably be demonstrated (by simulation) to behave similarly to the public health model of disease propagation. It likely also closely follows the spread of data destruction and negative impacts upon human society much following the model a computer software virus. In this situation however it is as if two viruses are exchanging DNA while co-evolving. One of them is us, the other is silicon based. Truly a re-release updated version of the “War of the Worlds”.
Combined with the all-too-human tendency to have fits and snits and to feel like we are up to our Zolofts in troubles, we have a formula for real Snafu* hell, and ‘interesting times’—as in the probably erroneously quoted and attributed famous Chinese curse — ‘may you live in interesting times’.
World-wide computing is so linked through the agency of human misinterpretation, that it is ultimately a single confused communications channel involving human and silicon based ‘minds’. It is now so vast and fast that it is unknowable. It cannot know itself. The silicon ‘minds’ are too dumb to know anything, and we can’t know it either. It is an interesting living scrap heap from which we may often pull shiny coins. A kind of Heisenbergian Uncertainty Principle is operating here. As soon as we look at the information or the flow, it is changed, look again and we have changed it again. And so on. Pull something out of the heap and some of the heap caves in.
I don’t believe in evil or in daemons, yet the accidental accumulation of little daemons lies in the details. As errors combine and accumulate among details, there is greater potential that their at some critical moment the heap will slide and errors, once un-noticed, will identify themselves by cascading, contributing to some sort of disaster. Most errors are born the way my grandmother believed house-flies were born—by cryptospontaneous generation. She was wrong about house-flies and cockroaches but would have been somewhat right about data bugs and corruption involving decay and cosmic rays. These birth accidents and many other kinds of tiny secret couplings (perhaps we could pass a law forbidding this) cause accidental little evil daemons. Heisenberg and the cosmos are about as spontaneous as we can get in a deterministic universe. Mix lots of details, accidents, and bugs over time and what do you get? A tangle of complexity.
Humans enter data into desktop computers, often while in ‘conversation’ with other humans, and innocently believe that they are merely making a record of the conversation. In fact their entry becomes a part of the world-wide conversation among computers and flows into the minds and cultures of countless unknown humans. We move our ideas and our illnesses. We always have.
*From a World War II Army acronym for "Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”
see snafu http://snafuprinciple.blogspot.com/