Under the Bludgeonings of Chance
A few voices today are calling for a change in the way we program computers, and the clamor will surely increase as the years go by and the failures mount in frequency and consequence. Even with the rising pressure, though, it won't be easy to change how we think about computers and how we should use them.One of the hardest lessons history teaches is that we don't change anything expensive until some of us have died. Cars didn't have brakes, streets didn't have stoplights, electricians didn't have to be certified, and locomotive engineers didn't have to be drug tested until enough of us had died. So it's likely that we'll only really change how we build computer systems after some major computer catastrophe.
That isn't to say that computer technology is built by incompetents. The vast majority of our technology works, and works well. We never notice it when it works, it's only when it doesn't that we pay any attention at all. For every Challenger explosion there are thousands of successful rocket launches. For every plane crash there are tens of thousands of uneventful flights. For every Chernobyl there are hundreds of thousands of hours of cheap and trouble-free energy produced by nuclear power plants.
We can't afford to guard against every eventuality, because there are too many of them and our brains are too tiny to encompass them all. So, for the most part, we have to look at things in the short term and wait until we're forced to do something. Then we throw money at it. Doing otherwise would be paying an impossibly high price for future safety.
A soda pop bottle, for example, can always explode. There isn't enough money in the universe to make sure that's impossible. So whether manufacturers do it consciously or not, they must balance their costs against their potential losses due to possible lawsuits. The money they spend on safety margins in their factories implicitly reflects roughly how much money they expect to pay out if something goes wrong. The same thing is true for shaving cream, pressure cookers, children's toys, electrical wall plugs---in fact, every artifact we create. There's no way for it to be any different. All lives have a price.
And the cost of lives varies. When the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed nearly three thousand people and injured two hundred thousand more, Union Carbide paid the survivors what some thought those lives were worth: fifteen hundred dollars per work-year lost through untimely death. If the plant had been in Manhattan or London, however, the cost per life would have been far higher and Union Carbide would probably be out of business.
Sentiment sounds wonderful. It reinforces our belief that we're special. But it's not practical. Life is risk.
Flying Blind