ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160095
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT LEE HOTZ AND FRANK CLIFFORD LOS ANGELES TIMES
The pilots of a Boeing 767 jetliner, misled by the complex gauges of their new aircraft, ran out of fuel in the air with 69 passengers aboard.
A convict, under computer-monitored house arrest, was able to slip his electronic manacles and commit murder because the system monitoring his whereabouts was not designed to redial authorities when it encountered a busy signal.
And in a similar slip of technology, when a tree branch brushed a high-voltage transmission line in Oregon last week, what has been called the largest machine in the world - the West's power grid - stumbled, then failed. The resulting outage in seven states, apparently caused by the simultaneous loss of six separate power lines, triggered a cascade of other problems, ranging from dead stoplights to air traffic control snarls across half the United States.
Such unexpected mishaps are the ``revenge effects'' of technology, according to Princeton historian Edward Tenner.
Yale sociologist Charles Perrow calls them ``normal accidents.''
They are the unpredictable but inevitable consequences of the growing complexity of a technological civilization, systems experts say. Even momentary glitches in how things work feed society's traditional uneasiness over the devil's bargain between the benefits and the drawbacks of progress.
More than ever, Americans appear to be worshiping at the altar of high technology, and their belief in its reliability is the secular faith that sustains them. But the infallibility of complex engineering systems is as much an illusion as the feeling of control they confer upon their users.
And when such complex systems fail, it leaves behind a snarl of recriminations. Who is to blame - the public that demands technical infallibility or the engineers who promise it?
The answer may be that human ingenuity is on a collision course with the mathematics of chaos - as technology develops into more complex systems, small problems can combine in ways that designers do not foresee and certainly do not intend. Some experts are not sure whether it is the creators of the systems or society that has gotten ahead of itself.
``Global problems can result from seemingly isolated events,'' said Peter Neumann, an expert on risk and technology at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.
Each time a single technological failure is fixed, ``people keep saying this will never happen again, but it keeps happening again and again,'' he said. ``Whether we like it or not, we must coexist with people and systems of unknown and unidentifiable trustworthiness.''
But as increasingly complex subsystems are linked together - whether they are circuits on a Pentium computer chip or households on a national power grid - there is no way anyone ever can completely understand what has been created and the myriad ways it may fail. It is possible, some say, that many of the systems in which the public places its trust have grown too complicated and expensive to be made completely reliable. The best that engineers can do is attempt to design these systems to fail safely, said University of Southern California Professor Ralph Keeney. The power outage that struck Saturday was a good example of a managed failure that only affected a fraction of the people served by the grid.
But all too often, the safety systems themselves are the reason a problem gets out of control.
In 1990, a minor electronic failure paralyzed AT&T's long distance system for 11 hours. Flaws in the automated recovery system triggered a spasm of repeating failures that quickly spread through the entire network.
That flawed safety net had been designed in response to a major failure a decade earlier of the ARPANET, the computer network that was the predecessor of today's Internet.
The inability, or unwillingness, to fathom the complexity of a system is responsible for the paradoxical effects of many innovations: Better roads cause more traffic congestion, not less. Antibiotics lead to more virulent diseases.
Some years ago, farmers in the Southeast doused their fields with pesticides to control deadly fire ants. They killed all the pest's natural predators instead, leaving the stinging ants more uncontrollable than ever.
Luckily, for many people the weekend outage was no more than a momentary interruption in service. Like the unlucky Air Canada jet that ran out of fuel in 1983, the behemoth of a technological society usually is able to glide safely to rest in the aftermath of each serious system failure.
Apocalyptic visions of total technical collapse remain safely in the realm of science fiction, where the footfalls of the future sometimes can be heard most clearly.
But in the real world, as air traffic control systems are linked to military navigation satellites - and railroad safety systems are piggybacked on both - the consequences may not be so entertaining or so farfetched.
``In the long term, we are in serious trouble unless something dramatic is done,'' said Neumann, the SRI risk expert.
While the myth of the simple, self-sustaining life endures in the West today, attracting a new wave of settlers, the reality is reflected in the satellite dishes that dot the countryside, the computers and fax machines that adorn trailer homes and ranch houses, and the cellular phones that are becoming as common as rifle racks in pickup trucks.
The necessary interdependence of high technology runs counter to traditional Western pride in frontier self-sufficiency. ``One of the great ironies of the American West is that it is a region from the beginning heavily dependent on someone else'' for essential services, said New Mexico author and scholar Karl Hess Jr.
Saturday's power outage, the second in five weeks, highlights how unlikely - and yet inevitable - such complex regional failures can be.
``The whole West is a warren of interconnected transmission lines. The power grid in the West is the largest machine that man has ever made'' - stretching from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific Coast to the Rockies, said Karl Stahlkopf, vice president for power delivery at the Electrical Power Research Institute.
``But like any machine, like your lawn mower or your computer or your car, it is susceptible to breakdown.''
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