E.M.Forster wrote the short story The Machine Stops in 1909, and it was the early paradigm of the story of a mechanical and scientific Eden where everything was done for mankind by the "machines". In Forster's story, the machine stops, leading to a breakdown of civilization as it is known in the sanitized and sequestered community of mankind where even the weather is controlled.
One day, the world controlling machine stops, and it stops not with a Bang!, but a whimper.
How prone are the electronic machines to a breakdown? I always thought that one of our major problems would occur as our systems break down, either willingly or unwillingly, and they show us numerous signs that they may do so at some point in time. One thinks of such things when the stock market plunges 1,000 points in 2 minutes, as it did this year. Purely a glitch. Got it under control. No need to worry.
But the most serious threat to our machines is WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks says it will dump secret information from one of the Too-Big-To-Fail Banks in 2011, and the aftermath should be interesting.
The hackers and leakers are the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil in our modern electronic Eden, and will probably continue to be so. Quantum computing will have its hackers. Governments hope that the future of computing includes costs so great that only nation-states may afford it: things such as Stuxnet!
WikiLeaks is an information revolution.
In democratic systems, the Revolution of Real Information will be something we have never seen before.
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