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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Super Bugs

 Sibyl of Delphi in the Sistine Chapel

More resistant strains of "super bugs". Not only that, but now Iran seems to be getting into the nation-state hacker business as pay-back for the Stuxnet computer bug that the US and Israel gave them.

A bug  is something that cannot be easily anticipated in a complex environment. We have to let the "bug" appear, then we re-act.
This holds true whether the "bug" is a glitch in stock trading which causes the Dow Jones Industrial Average to pllummet 1,000 points in ten minutes, or whether it is a microbial infection.
As our systems become more complex, this threat increases: bugs are created and spread exponentially. If you add in some sort of natural disaster or environmental dislocation, you could have an unpleasant catastrophe.

The scenario of the Fukushima power plant is instructive:  the "bug" is the possibility of a tsunami which was apparently ignored. It would have required more expensive systems and structures to guard against. Now there is rumor of the electric company being nationalized by the government, because its financial outlook has become so burdened by the disaster.
The government can only nationalize so much, particularly now since governments themselves are on shaky financial footings.

The future belongs to super bugs.
It does so because there is way too much momentum dedicated to increasing the fragile complexity of the world. Nothing can slow down the surge to super-human complex systems which will profit in the short-term, but will cause disaster in the long-term. We have no regulators or monitors that have been proven to be able to function in the long-term, much less do we have any sufficient science to speedily meet the unexpected challenges thrown at us. Look at the SCIENCE we used in Fukushima:  fire trucks pumping sea water.

My predictions remain unchanged. Just like the Delphic Sibyl, I suddenly glance towards the the coming times, appalled by the News of the Future!
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