Is it dangerous for humans to depend on computers?

In the ultimate week, we’ve got visible the first-class and worst of computer generation.
In China, Google’s DeepMind synthetic intelligence software took on and beat the sector champion of the complex recreation of Go, reducing him to tears. Nineteen-yr-antique Ke Jie defined the AI computer as “perfect, ideal, without any feelings”.
But in airports in the UK and some place else ultimate weekend tears have been also being shed over computer systems.
In this situation, though, the primary emotions were frustration and rage over the chaos triggered whilst British Airways’ IT system collapsed, leaving thousands of passengers going nowhere and their luggage stuck they knew no longer where.
What is placing about each these instances is how tough human beings observed it provide an explanation for exactly what was taking place inside the brains of the computer systems.

DeepMind’s AlphaGo is essentially self-taught – it changed into shown the simple guidelines of Go after which it frolicked looking at thousands and thousands of video games and playing in opposition to itself, developing with moves that astounded professional players and its creators.
BA’s computer systems had been no longer so smart. The agency says its troubles commenced whilst there was a strength surge at a statistics center at Heathrow Airport in London.
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That shouldn’t have been extra than a temporary hitch – in reality, one expert informed me it ought to now not have even set the lights blinking at the statistics center – but it seems to have brought about a series reaction which took out the entire system.

That supposed the ocean of complicated facts approximately passengers, luggage and plane moves was correctly frozen – and it took forty-eight hours to unfreeze it and get the airline operating again.
Any fundamental corporation is likely to have each a backup device to switch to while things cross wrong and a catastrophe healing plan, which must be rehearsed on an everyday basis. But in British Airways’ case neither seems to have worked because it should.
The trade unions blame value-reducing and the truth that BA outsourced a whole lot of its IT operation to India last year.

The bosses deny that and say they are now clear what went wrong – but up to now, were not able to give an explanation that appears satisfactory to human beings with expertise in how statistics centers and most important IT operations paintings.
But what is apparent is that ever greater areas of our lives are dependent on massive PC systems, regularly now hosted in information centers owned by using groups like Amazon and Microsoft.
These structures have ended up critical to industries from banking to travel to healthcare and they may be helping them turn out to be greater green – from time to time with the aid of getting an awful lot of the paintings done in countries like India in which fees are decreasing.
They also are making existence higher in all styles of ways – simply think about how time-ingesting it used to be to book a flight or practice for a place at university and how much paper changed into involved.

But now we are beginning to discover simply how helpless we experience when, for something motive, the computers fail.

In Britain, medical doctors whose computer systems froze for the duration of the current ransomware attack had to turn patients away. In Ukraine, there have been strength cuts whilst hackers attacked the power gadget, and five years in the past, hundreds of thousands of Royal Bank of Scotland clients had been not able to get at their cash for days after troubles with a software program upgrade.