In an age of advanced technology, bugs and glitches have become a part of modern existence. We entrust complex machines like airplanes with our lives without so much as batting an eye. Nonetheless, especially when a technology is being pioneered or developed, there’s no way to escape mistakes… and those mistakes are sometimes fatal and tragic. Technology writer James Chiles describes himself as obsessed with tracing the history of technological mistakes. In this book, he shares disaster stories he’s collected over the years, grouped by what human act triggered the malady.
This book makes its own fairly original genre by maintaining a perspective that most technologists seek to avoid. Most of us like to get things working. Thinking about how things might blow up can come unnaturally when all we’re thinking about is how to succeed. This book can retrain us to take a defensive posture at times by seeing how humans are directly responsible for disastrous machine malfunctions.
Though highly schooled in the sciences, I’ll admit this book caused me to slow down my reading pace. I often had to reread a paragraph because its scientific contents were so carefully described. While that’s a credit to Chiles’ intellectual mastery, it also limits the potential audience. If you are not interested in analyzing a malfunction along every angle, this book is probably not for you.
Fortunately, it is well-suited for engineers seeking to refine the quality of their work. For most technologists I know, avoiding a fatal disaster due to their work is high on the list of possible horror stories to eschew. This book’s examples are grounded firmly in the machine world, and stories from information technology, now gaining in popularity, are almost completely avoided. Some of the stories harken back to the 1800s yet still convey the limits of human nature.
This book is almost 25 years old, and I’d be interested in a second edition of more recent stories. I’m sure computers and code would play an increasing role, and I’m curious what lessons might be learned. The world’s complexity is only growing as the years proceed, and managing complex systems is an valuable professional skill. This book can refine readers’ ability to identify escape hatches and foresee problems. That’s why I chose to read it. Although it can also convey a sense of anxious worry, a measured dose of paranoia can drive increased performance in a work environment where lives are critically at stake.
Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology
By James R. Chiles
Copyright (c) 2001, 2002
Harper
ISBN13 9780066620824
Page Count: 338
Genre: Technology
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