(Fragile) Software => Fragile World
I’m rereading Nassim N. Taleb’s Antifragile, where he talks about things which gain from disorder and of course in contrast about things which breaks from disorder. This reminded me of the fragility in software. My non coder friends probably don’t realize it but software breaks all the time and in very unexpected ways. Few months ago, I was not able to make cash on delivery orders on Amazon because it didn’t recognize my phone number. It turned out that it was because of a bug in the libphone library by Google. I also have trouble using the RailNet wifi available at many of Railway stations because I never receive the One Time Password (OTP) on my mobile, which required to use the wifi. I suspect it is because of the same error in libphone and RailNet systems have not upgraded their dependencies. In my case things bugs only caused inconvenience but there have been cases where software bugs have taken people’s lives. Because of huge number of inter dependent parts, it is practically impossible to write software which doesn’t contain bugs. Unfortunately, I see that there is a general lack of appreciation of limits of software/technical solutions. In a world which is becoming increasingly dependent on software, fragility of the software increases the fragility of the world around us. There needs to be much more emphasis on “What if things breaks?” because things will break, today or tomorrow. Our government (both current and previous one) is also very aggressively pushing digital where there is clearly no urgent need to (think Aadhaar and Cashless). Move fast break things works only in the cases where there is limited loss from bad solutions and huge gains from good one. In cases where there can be huge loss to millions by a bad solution and only limited benefits from good solutions, go slow.
Bonus:
- Shut up and take my Money: A talk at CCC about security vulnerabilities of N26, a P2P money transfer app used in Europe.
- Everyone Loves a Good Drought: Classic tales of roads paved to hell by good intentions.
