nycterent - Kuru

The unfortunate fact of technological progress is that companies are gleefully plunging ahead with technologies that they can’t possibly understand or fully control. They hope they understand them, of course, but only a few people in the whole company are even competent to decide if that understanding is adequate for the task at hand. Look at the crash of Swiss Air flight 111, for instance: a modern aircraft brought down by its onboard entertainment system, killing all aboard. The pilots had no idea it was even possible for an electrical fire to occur in the entertainment system. Nothing on their checklists warned them of it, and they had no way in the cockpit to disable it even if they’d had the notion to. This was a failure of design; a failure of imagination.