On Sat, 8 Dec 2007 01:52:19 -0500, "Eisboch"
wrote:
Just think. Your words may forever be considered with a chuckle by future
generations of Google archive viewers, just as Teddy Roosevelt's reluctance
to accept or rely upon the horseless carriage as a replacement for horse
drawn modes of transportation. In 1902 he would ride in a horseless
carriage, but insisted that it be followed by a conventional horse drawn
carriage in case of a breakdown or failure of the new fangled contraption.
So be it and I understand your analogy - it is applicable.
However, consider this. Eventually, the automobile led to tractors
which could pull 40 bottom plows 20 miles in one day - 10 miles out,
ten miles back across the plains of Middle America which eventually
led to the dust bowl and the Depression. What was the cost of
applying the technology in this manner over time?
I'm not playing the role of Ned Ludd nor am I a neo-Luddite although I
do share one belief with them - that the rapid adoption and
application of technology has negative effects on individuals, society
or the planet and can outweigh its benefits by many orders of
magnitude.
For example - just now on the news, they had a segment on outsourcing
personal services. They used the example of one couple who outsources
reading their two children a bed time story to a woman in Croatia -
via the Internet. Or the couple who hired a wedding planner in India
to coordinate a wedding in Milwaukee - he lives in San Diego, she
lives in Phoenix and a gentleman who pays a monthly fee for a "virtual
concierge" in Hungary who handles all his scheduling, travel plans,
business lunches/dinners and a host of other personal services. There
is even a book about it - "The Four Hour Workweek".
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
That my friend, is a total misapplication of technology.
While I am concerned about social negative effects, my complaint is
about the vulnerability of the system. For example, take the average
home with a couple of kids, three wireless computers, a TiVO with a
wireless connection and VoIP. Think accident with a cup of coffee or
a fall breaking the router. What happens? Do they have a spare? Did
they think far enough ahead about the potential of failure to purchase
a CAT5/6 cable to connect one computer to the modem?
Think back to what happened in Chicago about ten or so years ago when
that 5 dollar part in a phone switch broke collapsing everything from
air traffic control which shut down O'Hare for eight hours to the
Mercantile Exchange and potentially creating financial havoc because
settlements couldn't be executed for 28 hours - the amount of time it
took to find the break in the system.
The larger the digital system becomes, the more centralized the system
is despite the advantages of distributed systems technology - it's
human nature to condense and consolidate. Tom Barbash's 2003 book "On
Top of the World" details the decision of Cantor Fitzgerald to store
back up data off site in New Jersey - originally, they were going to
store it on secure servers on site in the basement of the WTC. Think
about what might have happened if their decision was to keep it at WTC
- one quarter of the world's treasury bond trading passes through
Cantor Fitzgerald. That one simple decision saved the world from the
potential of economic collapse - or at the least slowed conditions as
they tried to reconstruct trading data going back years.
Put simply, the more complex the system, the more complete the
centralization, the more vulnerable the system becomes.
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