Human Error
“Human Error” – A cartoon which illustrates that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
Across today’s society new technologies have prevented human suffering or catastrophe.
For example, In 1980, there were an estimated 2.6M deaths globally due to measles, yet due to widespread vaccination efforts, the number of measles deaths had decreased to approximately 60,700, representing a reduction of over 97%.
However, there have also been some notable examples where those bodies responsible for prevention have caused enormous harm.
Investigations have suggested that Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was conducting “gain-of-function” research, which involves manipulating viruses to better understand their potential to cause disease, as one of the potential originators of COVID-19.
Also, Thalidomide was initially marketed in the 1950s as a preventative to morning sickness in pregnant women, but it resulted in 10K-20K birth defects.
More recently, CrowdStrike, a cyber security company with advanced hacker threat detection capabilities, uploaded faulty code in an update, which has resulted in a global outage with direct cost in the $100Ms as well as indirect costs to people’s lives.
The apparent cause for this incident, like many of the others, is human error – “what it looks like is, potentially, the vetting or the sandboxing they do when they look at code, maybe somehow this file was not included in that or slipped through,” said Steve Cobb, chief security officer at Security Scorecard.
Perhaps this is a good reason to spur on the deployment of ‘no code, low code’ movement and get Artificial Intelligence to do more error checking of code or safety requirements in general.
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