Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: The fly in this ointment is hacking. There will always be antisocial and > criminal types who will cause problems for a automated society in > proportion to the level of our dependence on that automation. >
It hasn't happened yet. People had the ability to disrupt society in the past in various ways, such as robbing banks. They did not do that very often. Note that nowadays with cameras and police networks it is almost impossible to rob a bank and get away with it. Many other kinds of crime and disruption are becoming difficult. This year there has been a plague of credit card theft. There are many technical solutions to this problem. They should have been implemented years ago. Now that Target and other stores have had to pay huge sums of money, I am sure credit card technology will be improved. And then there will be those occasional solar flares that will take out all > automation for months or years at a time . . . > Again, it hasn't happened yet. We have had electronics for a long time. I do not know of a single instance of this happening on a large scale. Computers are more robust than many members of the public think. I recall widespread fears about the Y2K problem. This was exaggerated. There would have been severe problems if the programmers had not fixed computers in the 1990s. The point is, they did fix them. People tend to see the disadvantages and the weaknesses of new technology more clearly than they see the problems with old technology. People talk about self-driving cars saying "they'll never get me into one of those things!" That is what my grandmother said about airplanes. (She did fly occasionally toward the end of her life but she was nervous.) Or they say "What if self-driving cars cause accidents?" They forget that human driven cars cause accidents. The automated car only has to work better than a human driven one. It does not have to be perfect. That is true of other new technology. Yes, there may be ways to disrupt a computer-based society, but there were ways to disrupt society before we had computers. I do not see signs that disruption is more widespread than it used to be.
