A Glitch in the System

The pilots of a Boeing 767 jetliner, misled by the complex gauges of their new aircraft, ran out of fuel in midair with 69 passengers aboard.

A convict, under computer-monitored house arrest, slipped his electronic manacles to commit murder because the system monitoring his whereabouts was not designed to redial authorities when it encountered a busy signal.

And in a similar slip of technology, when a tree branch brushed a high-voltage transmission line in Oregon last week, what has been called the largest machine in the world--the West’s power grid--stumbled, then failed. The resulting outage in seven states, apparently caused by the simultaneous loss of six separate power lines, triggered a cascade of other problems, ranging from dead stoplights to air traffic control snarls across half the United States.

Such unexpected mishaps are the “revenge effects” of technology, according to Princeton historian Edward Tenner.

Yale sociologist Charles Perrow calls them “normal accidents.”

They are the unpredictable but inevitable consequences of the growing complexity of a technological civilization, systems experts say. Even momentary glitches in how things work feed society’s traditional uneasiness over the devil’s bargain between the benefits and the drawbacks of progress.

More than ever, Americans appear to be worshiping at the altar of high technology, and their belief in its reliability is the secular faith that sustains them. But the infallibility of complex engineering systems is as much an illusion as the feeling of control they confer upon their users.

And when such complex systems fail, it leaves behind a snarl of recriminations. Who is to blame--the public that demands technical infallibility or the engineers who promise it?

The answer may be that human ingenuity is on a collision course with the mathematics of chaos--as technology develops into more complex systems, small problems can combine in ways that designers do not foresee and certainly do not intend. Some experts are not sure whether it is the creators of the systems or society that has gotten ahead of itself.

“Global problems can result from seemingly isolated events,” said Peter G. Neumann, an expert on risk and technology at SRI International in Menlo Park.

Each time a single technological failure is fixed, “people keep saying this will never happen again, but it keeps happening again and again,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, we must coexist with people and systems of unknown and unidentifiable trustworthiness.”

Indeed, the public’s faith in a system--whether it is the air traffic control network, the blood supply or electronic banking--may be as important as the integrity of its engineering.

“The confidence is critical to the effective working of a system,” said Paul Slovic, a specialist in public perception of risk at Decision Research in Eugene, Ore. “It is a delicate balance. All of these are complicated management systems and we tend to trust them until something happens that shakes our faith.”

But as increasingly complex subsystems are linked together--whether they are circuits on a Pentium computer chip or households on a national power grid--there is no way anyone ever can completely understand what has been created and the myriad ways it may fail. It is possible, some say, that many of the systems in which the public places its trust have grown too complicated and expensive to ever be made completely reliable. The best that engineers can do is attempt to design these systems to fail safely, said USC professor Ralph Keeney. The power outage that struck Saturday was a good example of a managed failure that only affected a fraction of the people served by the grid.

But all too often the safety systems themselves are the reasons a problem gets out of control.

In 1990, a minor electronic failure paralyzed AT&T;’s long distance system for 11 hours. Flaws in the automated recovery system triggered a spasm of repeating failures that quickly spread through the entire network.

That flawed safety net had been designed in response to a major failure a decade earlier of the ARPANET, the computer network that was the predecessor of today’s Internet.

The inability, or unwillingness, to fathom the complexity of a system is responsible for the paradoxical effects of many innovations: Better roads cause more traffic congestion, not less. Antibiotics lead to more virulent diseases.

Some years ago, farmers in the Southeast doused their fields with pesticides to control deadly fire ants. They killed all the pest’s natural predators instead, leaving the stinging ants more uncontrollable than ever.

Luckily, for many people the weekend outage was no more than a momentary interruption in service. Like the unlucky Air Canada jet that ran out of gas in 1983, the behemoth of a technological society usually is able to glide safely to rest in the aftermath of each serious system failure.

Apocalyptic visions of total technical collapse remain safely in the realm of science fiction, where the footfalls of the future sometimes can be heard most clearly.

In the 1972 novel, “The End of the Dream,” author Philip Wylie offered a chilling portrayal of how a single tug at one of technology’s loose ends unraveled an entire civilization. He explored how easily life on Earth could be overwhelmed by a series of overlapping technical and environmental mishaps. Starting with the seemingly innocuous, such as river-choking algae blooms and weather extremes, the problems quickly escalated into progressively more devastating incidents, including widespread power failures, airline disasters and nuclear accidents. The eventual result was the extinction of humankind--a victim, like the dinosaurs, of overspecialization.

More whimsically, author Robert Heinlein explored the consequences of linking complex electronic systems in his 1966 science fiction classic, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” His computer system wakes up one morning not only conscious, but independent enough to rebel against its human masters on Earth.

But in the real world, as air traffic control systems are linked to military navigation satellites--and railroad safety systems are piggybacked on both--the consequences may not be so entertaining or so farfetched.

“In the long term, we are in serious trouble unless something dramatic is done,” said Neumann, the SRI risk expert.

The skepticism about technology that shows up in some science fiction is embedded in the national character as much as the obsession with consumer gadgets.

Even when people try to simplify their lives and escape the complexity of modern civilization, they find themselves irrevocably wedded to the technology they are fleeing. Consider the anti-government survivalists, the self-styled Freemen, who steadfastly refused to surrender to the FBI in Montana for months--until federal agents disconnected them from the power grid.

Many people take a special delight in the Chaplinesque pratfalls of technology, such as the space shuttle toilet that won’t flush properly or the bank computer that issues a check for $10 million more than intended. At the same time, they are repulsed by its other innovations, like computerized sales calls.

Society has struggled to reconcile its feelings toward machinery and technology for more than a century.

The feature attraction of the 1876 centennial celebration in Philadelphia was the 40-foot-high, 8,000-ton Corliss steam engine--a powerful symbol of a young nation that placed its trust in the muscle of technology. One magazine summed up the popular and critical reaction to the colossus this way: “Surely here, and not in literature, science or art is the true evidence of man’s creative power.”

But the Industrial Revolution simultaneously was spawning a counter-trend toward simplicity and spirituality, especially in the frontier West. It was evident in the plain hand-tooled Craftsman style, a turn-of-the-century reaction against the Machine Age, and in the emerging environmental movement’s opposition to dams and commercial intrusions on natural settings.

This also was the era of America’s most enduring icon of romantic, rural simplicity--the cowboy. The imagery of a place where man’s only tools were a horse, a rope and a gun overpowered the reality of dependence on railroads, irrigation systems and pipelines.

And while the myth of the simple, self-sustaining life endures in the West of today, attracting a new wave of settlers, the reality is reflected in the satellite dishes that dot the countryside, the computers and fax machines that adorn trailer homes and ranch houses and the cellular phones that are becoming as common as rifle racks in pickup trucks.

“For those of us who live in the rural West, the Internet is our tie to the outside world. When that line is cut, I feel naked,” said New Mexico author and scholar Karl Hess Jr.

The necessary interdependence of high technology runs counter to traditional Western American pride in frontier self-sufficiency. “One of the great ironies of the American West is that it is a region from the beginning heavily dependent on someone else” for essential services, Hess said.

Saturday’s power outage, the second in five weeks, highlights how unlikely--and yet inevitable--such complex regional failures can be.

“The whole West is a warren of interconnected transmission lines. The power grid in the West is the largest machine that man has ever made”--stretching from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific Coast to the western front of the Rockies, said Karl Stahlkopf, vice president for power delivery at the Electrical Power Research Institute.

“But like any machine, like your lawn mower or your computer or your car, it is susceptible to breakdown.”