Our Ugliest Social Equation

"“The number of lives lost must increase until it exceeds the public’s appetite for enduring it.” - Jeff Caruso

Figure 1.1 Cyberpunk 2025: Law Enforcement Robot By SUNSHINE1617

Public safety and corporate greed have been at odds ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution. History has proved time and again that safety legislation only gets passed once the cost of human life exceeds the public’s tolerance for corporate bullshit.

I dedicated several chapters to this topic in the third edition of Inside Cyber Warfare (the print edition will drop on October 22nd), but it’s really the core principle of the entire book; i.e., that we have tolerated unsafe code ever since the invention of high speed computing at Los Alamos with the MANIAC, that things have only gotten worse since then, and that cyber-derived harms will increase until we experience a disaster similar to what brought change to the automotive and shipping industries in the last century.

I’ve pulled a few excerpts from the book to help illustrate my point.

The Labeling and Handling of Hazardous Materials

On April 16, 1947 at 9:12 am, it felt like the world came to an end for the citizens of Texas City, Texas. A massive explosion pulverized the SS Grandcamp along with its captain and most of its crew. The vessel’s 1.5 ton anchor was found two miles away, buried in a hole that was ten feet deep. 250 miles away, a Denver seismologist registered that an earthquake had occurred. Strategic Air Command in Omaha, NE briefly elevated the nation’s Defense Condition (DEFCON) believing that a nuclear bomb had detonated. 

Figure 1.2 A styrene plant became a roaring inferno on April 16, 1947, in Texas City. Hundreds of other fires started in areas where petroleum was stored. (Source: The Houston Chronicle)

At about 1am on April 17, the High Flyer exploded.

Almost 600 people were killed and three thousand injured. One in three homes in Texas City were uninhabitable. 25,000 people were homeless or jobless. 1100 cars and trucks were destroyed. It remains the deadliest accident in U.S. history.

Thousands of individual lawsuits against the U.S. government were consolidated into a class action that charged the U.S. government with negligence in “adopting the fertilizer export program as a whole, in its control of various phases of manufacturing, packaging, labeling and shipping the product, in failing to give notice of its dangerous nature to persons handling it, and in failing to police its loading on shipboard.” 

Unsafe At Any Speed

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration along with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards legislation that it was charged to enforce only came about because the public could no longer tolerate the ever-rising numbers of vehicle-related deaths and injuries that were happening in the late 1960’s.

The National Safety Council tracks causes of death (death due to n) and death rates (the number of people who died as a percentage of the total population) and found that:

“A period of rapidly increasing deaths (+26%) and death rates (+9%) occurred between 1961 and 1973. These increases were largely driven by surges in motor-vehicle deaths (+46%) and death rates (+26%).”

Ralph Nader, in his book “Unsafe at Any Speed” could have been speaking about the cybersecurity industry when he wrote:

“In fact, the gigantic costs of the highway carnage in this country support a service industry. A vast array of services - medical, police, administrative, legal, insurance, automotive repair, and funeral - stand equipped to handle the direct and indirect consequences of accident injuries. Traffic accidents create economic demands for these services running into billions of dollars. This is where the remuneration lies and this is where the talent and energies go. Working in the area of prevention of these casualties earns few fees.”

Deaths and Injuries From Software

In 1994, Donald MacKenzie, author of Mechanizing Proof (published in 2004 by MIT Press), was determined to investigate just how big a problem was software with programming flaws? Were people actually dying because of it? Were the fears overblown or justified? He set about to determine the number of deaths in computer-related accidents worldwide up until 1992. 

“The resultant data set contained 1,100 deaths. Over 90 percent of those deaths were caused by faulty human-computer interaction (often the result of poorly designed interfaces or of organizational failings as much as mistakes by individuals). Physical faults such as electromagnetic interference were implicated in a further 4 percent of deaths. Software bugs caused no more than 3 percent, or thirty, deaths: two from a radiation-therapy machine whose software control system contained design faults, and twenty-eight from faulty software in the Patriot antimissile system that caused a failed interception in the 1991 Gulf War.” 

Donald MacKenzie’s research paper on computer-related deaths was published separately in the Science and Public Safety journal in 1994. In that paper he raised the problem of under-reporting of less catastrophic accidents, “such as industrial accidents involving robots or other forms of computer-controlled automated plants.” 

In 2001, five patients of the Panama National Institute of Oncology died due to radiation over-exposure that resulted from software flaws in the radiation treatment planning software.

Possibly the worst example of software flaws resulting in fatalities were the two Boeing 737 crashes (October 2018 and February 2019) that resulted in the deaths of 346 people.

What Must Happen Before We Demand Change?

We are not on a slow curve to disaster. Harm has been increasing exponentially and in an ever-increasing variety of ways.

For example, Ukraine and Israel have come up with more and more ingenious ways to kill their adversaries using cyber attacks with kinetic effects. I explore some real-life examples that you probably haven’t heard about in chapter six.

The race to AGI in an unregulated global environment poses terrible risks, second only to an overly-regulated AI for Western nations that enables China to achieve human-level or superhuman intelligence before anyone else. I explore this conundrum further in chapter seven.

If these issues concern you, or if you want to learn more, I can’t wait for you to read my book and tell me what you think. Even better, send a copy to your Congressman and Senator.

You can pre-order at Amazon, or purchase the Kindle version today.

If you’d like a special autographed copy from me that I’ll ship to you by Priority Mail shortly after the print version drops, please place your order here.

Grazie Mille!