This first Lessons Learned article is the most esoteric and profound of the series. That's why I put it first in line. Since man first started using tools, our path has been to make more tools, more machines, and to automate more things. Lately, the rate of change has accelerated to a breathtaking pace mostly thanks to information technology (IT). IT has also allowed us to communicate much better and via communications to forge interdependencies that help make the world more efficient and our machines more autonomous.
Despite our marvelous machines, it is fair to say that the world is still people-dominated not machine-dominated. I say until now, because I interpret Y2K as the first early warning sign that we are approaching the critical point where that dominance begins to yield. As a result, we have mishandled some aspects of our information technology and the result was Y2K. If we don't reform, Y2K won't be the last time that we foolishly shoot ourselves in the foot on a grand scale. We have been dancing on the rim of the canyon without even knowing there was a canyon in the vicinity.
In recent decades, we realized that world population has reached the point where we could no longer pretend that the planet was infinitely big. Pollutants dumped down the drain don't disappear in an infinitely big ocean. We had to begin considering interrelationships and interdependencies that had been considered negligible. I suggest that we are coming to the same point with respect to technology and that Y2K is the clearest possible warning signal we're likely to get.
"So what?" you say. "What specifically can we do differently?" As modern society becomes gradually more like a well-oiled machine, we are going to have to start treating it more like a machine than a social system. Social systems evolve via politics whereas we design machines. I use the word machine loosely to include hardware, software and automation.
The essential difference between design and politics is that politics is called the art of compromise, whereas design hates compromise. When two or more people in a design committee disagree, one is most likely right (or most right) and the others are wrong. The job of the committee is not to make compromises or to be fair, but to find out what's right and what's wrong and to pass judgment. In design, people don't matter, nature matters. The natural world is the machine's operating environment.
Folklore says that the best design comes from the cohesive vision of a single person, and that design by committee is the worst kind. In reality, many engineering companies have learned to make very good designs using large teams while avoiding the designed by committee pitfall. Boeing, designing the 747 is an example that comes to mind. Nevertheless, design can't be democratic. It must evolve from an authoritative structure.
I interpret the Y2K crisis as a design problem. I am not referring to the design of date handling in programs, but rather to the design of interdependencies and risks and quality assurance in our modern automated world. The problem isn't an error, but rather that our top-level systems aren't designed at all. Instead, countless engineers, programmers and managers make individual decisions and the whole is the result of collective chaotic efforts. Nobody has the authority to make the technological decisions for enterprises, industries, nations or planets.
Imagine for example a team of food scientists deciding that improvements in health care are stretching the design limits of our ability to deal with senior people and therefore medical research must temporarily cease. Preposterous. We don't even have the mechanisms to allow technical disciplines look over the shoulder of their brethren.
I further suggest that Y2K is only the first of many global scale technological disasters we may cause if we don't reform our methods. Another pending disaster is the relative impermanence of information stored digitally, because we keep revising our hardware and software. True, librarians and archivists are working hard to find a solution, but they haven't found one yet and they don't have the design authority to impose it on everyone when they do find one. Meanwhile, more and more records become irretrievable every day because of technology. The 1980's and 1990's may turn out to be the worst recorded decades in history since the invention of writing. Readers, I'm sure, could suggest others.
Engineering design methods require near dictatorial powers. They are certainly not our preferred methods to run this world. Our world is still people-oriented. Free enterprise, self-interest, family, democracy, fear and politics are the mechanisms we use to organize and grow our world.
My conclusion, after considering the implications of Y2K, is that adapting to a machine-dominated world implies designing the future rather than evolving it. It is certainly doable but the implications are frightening. Design implies central authority and loss of freedom. Design is antidemocratic. We could call it the politicization of technology, or the dehumanization of society. Either way, that leads me to the core of this lesson:
When technology and automation grow to the point where the planet becomes a limiting environment, it takes on the characteristics of a large complex machine, and it needs to be handled as a machine or else failures like Y2K will recur. The most direct remedy is to force a merger of engineering and politics. The present inhabitants of this planet are likely to find that unacceptable. Therefore, the advance of technology will have to bend to people, not vice-versa.
I find that personally upsetting, because I'm libertarian in my political views, almost to the point of being anarchist. I abhor central control. I'm also a technophile and I've spent my life trying to use technology and automation to make the world a better place. It never occurred to me before Y2K that these philosophies conflict. In the future I'll have to be less quick on the trigger to brand anyone less enthusiastic about automation than I as a Luddite. I may become one of them myself.
So, what are our choices? I see four paths.
First, we can choose the "pedal-to-the-metal" advance of technology and make whatever changes that implies to our social systems.
Second, we can try to turn our backs on technology. I don't think we would succeed. One can never turn the clock back.
Third, we can ease up on the gas in one or more ways, without becoming technophobes. Demanding quality and caution, and making IT more routine may be sufficient. Upcoming articles in the Lessons Learned series will focus on a number of such points. If adopted, they would require us to slow down a little.
Fourth, we can ignore the warnings and continue with no planning and no coordination. In other words, bury our heads in the sand. This is the cynic's choice for a future. It results in a modern yet dysfunctional world.
I was going to suggest science fiction allegory to illustrate future visions corresponding to each of the four paths. I decided against it because doing so might weaken my case by overstating it, but there's one I can't resist. I am a long time fan of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. It was voted best film of 1985. When I first heard about Y2K, Brazil was the first image to come to mind. I'm convinced that it portrays (surrealistically) our future if we hold the present course (path four). If you haven't seen it, go out and rent it.
==================================================================== To this day, I consider Brazil one of my all-time favorite movies. I'm not sure who voted it "best film of 1985", however. It didn't win any Academy Awards to my knowledge. Until now, however, I hadn't considered the Y2k connection. Thanks for the great column, and the "Brazilian Connection". Rent it. You'll either love it or hate it; there seems to be little middle ground (much like Y2k, I guess).
-- Steve (hartsman@ticon.net), July 08, 1999