The sinking of the Titanic. The Brescia explosion. The Bhopal disaster. Each catastrophe was caused by human error, and the huge impacts of these pose many questions and a vast argument.
We all make mistakes during our lifetimes, even every day, but the question is at which scale we will make them. And just how deadly they will and should be.
We can only try our best to be flawless. Even I made errors while writing this but an apparent lack of concentration for even a little while can cause heavily disastrous disasters 😉 . This has been repeatedly proven throughout history and with very minute effort (i.e. the examples at the top of this page).
Well, one can say that if we replace humans with robots, accidents will be minimized, which is duly true, but then we come to the subject of ethics.
Why should we populate our world with other machines rather than its own inhabitants?
Humans are the leaders of this planet, coordinating different actions and having the most roles out of any creature on Earth, and even if we ourselves can program AI, there will always be the question of whether it will take over us and obtain a higher status by being allocated more responsibility.
Robots also make mistakes because of us.
How do we get out of this goose chase?
On the same page of technology, we can also reduce harmful incidents by engineering programs that are safer. Seems obvious. However many businesses present and past did not find that a priority and lost a substantial portion of customers and profits due to mishaps (we’ve all seen those engineering fails).
But on a more serious level, this is actually much more impactful than you’d expect, and it could get worse during Covid. We’ve now got a much higher chance for disasters worse than Apollo 13, and I can only wonder what will happen with all those graduates who got their degrees online (it’s okay, we know you’re studying).
Read this article on scaffolding failures.
Anyways, if safety was made primary, the world could have its future secured (let’s not talk about the sun cooking up). ‘You need to spend money to save money’. Were resources properly invested into this, our problems would wilt. I’m not kidding, do you know how much our lives could improve?
Now let’s zoom out.
Let’s talk about un-screwing ourselves.
We know that we learn by making mistakes, and that each mistake we make helps us improve that tiny bit more.
- Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before quite literally changing the way we see the world today.
- Albert Einstein didn’t speak till he was four-years-old and failed his entrance exam to high school.
- Charlie Chaplin was forced to live in a workhouse at the age of 7 and his mother was permanently committed into an insane asylum.
- Dr. Seuss dropped out of Oxford University and had his first book rejected 28 separate times.
There are countless other innovators who failed like hell before succeeding, so we can select the path to take when analysing mistakes.
Either ridicule them, or use them as stepping stones to success.
To sum it up
- We’re screwed, but can change the level of screwed-ness by updating our systems (the school one would be nice)
- Mistakes are awesome. And so are probabilities. The more times we try, the closer we get to the time when things go well, but you might end up causing serious damage in the process (still, trust the process).
- I don’t get why you’re still afraid of failure. You haven’t even tried 10,000 times yet, what on Earth is the rush? Go fail.
And enjoy it.
