The Technology Trap

Book excerpt: In this eye-opening book, author Lloyd J. Dumas argues that our capacity for developing ever more powerful technologies and the unavoidable fallibility of both machine and man will lead us towards a disaster of an unprecedented scale. Most of us assume that those in charge can always find a way to control any technology mankind creates, no matter how powerful. But in a world of imperfect human beings who are prone to error, emotion, and sometimes to malevolent behavior, this could be an arrogant—and disastrous—assumption. This book is filled with compelling, factual stories that illustrate how easy it is for situations to go terribly wrong, despite our best efforts to prevent any issue. The author is not advocating an anti-technology "return to nature," nor intending to highlight the marvels of our high-tech world. Instead, the objective is to reveal the potential for disaster that surrounds us in our modern world, elucidate how we arrived at this predicament, explain the nature and ubiquity of human fallibility, expose why proposed "solutions" to these Achilles heels cannot work, and suggest alternatives that could thwart human-induced technological disasters.