What the geeks understand about the BP oil spill

The BP oil spill disaster may be remembered as the start of the new age of catastrophe, our World War One.

If corporations, the government and responsible people can't control the engineering outcomes involved in deep water drilling, what faith can we have that laboratory researchers won't inadvertently release some synthetic life, a lab-created horror that does more than kill marine life? These are not separate problems.

Of course we want to know what the risks are of deep water drilling and synthetic life research, and our willingness to accept the risks is determined by the range of consequences. But we're not very good at imagining consequences as real possibilities. Our faith in our own technical capabilities overpowers everything.

I believe that computer scientists, who are generally geeks, understand consequences better than most because they are intimately familiar with complexity. They understand that there is an infinite number of ways software systems can be tested.

Geeks also know that this complexity problem is compounded by a corporate priority of getting a product to market quickly and not ensuring that it is bug free as possible.

In 2000, Bill Joy, then the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, wrote an essay in Wired, "Why the future doesn't need us," that looked at the perils created by robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech.

Joy's essay is a powerful and timely read, particularly now. It's provocative on many levels, and a passage that is particularly interesting probes one of the arguments raised in the madness of Theodore Kaczynski -- the Unabomber.

Joy writes:

Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law -- "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.

The BP oil spill might save us from future disasters of even greater consequences if we can somehow pull a useful lesson out of it. But then the technology-based killing efficiencies of World War One were only improved upon for World War Two.