“Our entire modern civilization infrastructure is built on a shaky house of digital cards.”
This would have been funny if it weren’t true. A few days back one unintentional error in the code of one software company created chaos across the world. Ironically, this error was in the code of a company whose very purpose of existence is to keep the internet running safely. So it would be reasonable to assume that they were using the latest tech frameworks with the best possible safety precautions.
Now think about the software that so-called ‘structurally important’ institutions of the world use – the banks, insurance companies, telcos and airlines. One thing common among all of them is that they run on software which was written in the 70s. A huge chunk of that software is written in legacy languages like Cobol. Everyone who wrote that code is long gone.
That’s millions of lines of software code that no one understands anymore. Try finding someone today to debug that code. It’s more difficult than finding water on Mars. Everyone’s shit scared of touching that code because of the hundreds of billions of dollars involved. So it goes on and on and on, till one day by the simple law of probabilities, the whole thing comes crashing down.
Alternate Scenarios
Then there is the other aspect of hardware dependency. Imagine if someday, a stronger-than-usual solar flare were to happen, which from a historical perspective is not an uncommon event. Electromagnetic interference from solar flares often causes a form of ‘natural jamming’. Stronger solar flare could do more than that; it could ‘fry up’ the electronics of half the communication satellite orbiting around Earth.
Or, what if some state or non-state entity decides to cut off a few of the critical undersea fibre optic cables that form the lifeline of the internet? What happens then?
Banks will stop functioning. GPS will no longer work. Airlines and railways will come to a grinding halt. Internet and communication will go into a blackout. In words, there will be no long-distance movement of people, goods, information, or money. We will be back to the medieval times.
Bottom Line
It seems that our entire modern civilization infrastructure is built on a shaky house of digital cards.
Please don’t forget to follow us for more news about Elisa and the exciting world of AI chatbots.
You can schedule a free consulting session with us to learn more about how AI can help your business
