By:

Today’s pace of life can make you feel like you are strapped to the top of a rocket. With more and more screaming for your attention, we barely have time to send that long forgotten birthday card, let alone to sit down and think about the long-term effects of our innovations. But what if your latest and greatest innovation turned out to damage the lives of millions instead of improve them as planed? What if your proudest moment was also your most heinous?

At the start of the dual Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore draws our attention to two important components of the modern world. Although both have been around for thousands of years, by advances in technology, they are now able to detrimentally affect the lives of millions, or even billions, of people on the planet. The first is weapons innovation. The second is the effect our advances are having on climate change. When improper checks and balanced are used, we can now add a third to this; information technology.

If we’re not careful, it may cause more damage than climate change and armaments combined.

When it comes to the climate and weapons of mass destruction, we either have a grip on it or we are starting to try and control it. For information technology, we are in completely unknown territory, so we can only guess the outcomes. It is also an area of innovation used and exploited by practically everyone pushing the innovation agenda. The problem with that is, if we’re not careful, it may cause more damage than climate change and armaments combined.

Why? Let’s first take a step back and create a dichotomy of the type of serious information technology disasters. The first type is major and seriously affects a limited number of people. The second type is catastrophic and affects exponentially more. And the scariest thing about both types? They both occur in the same way. It’s only the number of people affected which differs.

An example of the first type of major disaster caused by our data driven lifestyles is the London Ambulance Service chaos of 1991(Körner 1996). Like most innovation projects, tragically the disarray was caused by the government trying to achieve an admirable goal; ambulances reaching 95% of emergencies within 15 minutes. The plan was to achieve this via a computer-aided dispatch system. However, as they started to partially implement the system via a semi-automatic scheme, the number of emergencies reached within 15 minutes dropped from the normal 65% to 30%. Ignoring these poor results, the fully automated system was introduced and after the first day fewer than 20% crisis situations were reached with the percentage falling again the next day.

After only six hours of using this system, it was taking staff up to 10 minutes to answer incoming phone calls. The volume of calls increased. People wondered why ambulances weren’t coming. Management decided to switch back to the semi-automated system. One week later the whole system crashed and 1.5 million pounds were flat lined.

Why did this happen? Because management was determined to introduce the new technology in 14 months. It was estimated after the disaster that a proper implementation should take around five years with all the necessary testing and quality controls. This is a point I will return to later.

An example of the second type of major disaster is the health care scare in California in 2007. It was a malfunction in the Department of Health Services’ new automated computer system which cut off the entitlements of thousands of poor seniors and people with disabilities. As a result, Medicare promptly cancelled their healthcare coverage (Dormehl 2014). Unlike the first type of disaster, things like this not only affect a city, but whole states or countries.

Although few disasters of the second type have occurred, we are nonetheless witnessing our society getting closer and closer to such catastrophes as can be observed in the constant stream of headline technology problems (credit card fraud, identity theft, etc.). What’s worse, sometimes systems that purport to protect us can cause more harm than good. One such system is the one used to classify people as terrorists at airports. These systems are so inaccurate that each week around 1,500 ill-fated airline travellers are incorrectly classified as terrorists. Examples of this include “a four year old boy, former Army majors and an American Airline pilot who was detained 80 times over the course of a single year.” (Dormehl 2014)

As more and more services enter the realm of code, the previous example is becoming more common. However, it is not just such errors but also intentionally designed features which can cause harm unintentionally; physical, psychological or both. Goolge’s powerful ad serving machine, AdWords, is known to present African-Americans with adverts such as “Have you ever been arrested?” accompanying their Google searches (Dormehl 2014).

As software relentlessly devours more services with more hastily implemented code, we can only pray for the best.

According to the co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital companies, Marc Andreessen, software is currently eating the world. As software relentlessly devours more services with more hastily implemented code, we can only pray for the best. These looming disasters should urge us to think and reflect on these new innovation tools as we are proselytizing innovation’s benefits. If our idea is to be released upon millions, are we sure what we’ve done has the necessary quality controls behind it to minimize a snowballing disaster?

As the pace of innovation picks up, there is a clear need to make sure our checks and balances are appropriate for the millions affected by our ideas. In this respect, many 20th century risk mitigation tools may no longer appropriate. We need to carefully consider a set of quality checks appropriate for the extreme reach of our innovations. Examples such as the 2010 Dow Jones Flash Crash, which annihilated 1 trillion dollars of wealth in just 300 seconds, is a violent reminder of the lack of proper quality controls.

As the people defining the innovation agenda of some of the largest and most influential companies in the world, we have a responsibility to think about the tools and techniques we are developing. It is a matter of professionalism even if you aren’t interested in an ethical debate because it would be tragic to be a victim of one’s own proud innovative idea. You just need to ask yourself, am I the masters of my innovations or is my drive to innovate mastering me?

By Evan Shellshear

About the author

Evan Shellshear is a creative applied researcher developing math based tools to solve difficult industrial problems. He has worked in many industries from automotive to medical and has published over a dozen scientific articles in peer reviewed journals. He has also published numerous articles on innovation and related areas. His specialty is on the translation of research tools into commercial products which he has done to create millions of dollars of value for companies such as Volvo Cars, GM, Ford, etc.

References:

Körner, T W 1996, The Pleasure of Counting, Cambridge University Press
Dormehl, L 2014, The Formula, Perigee Books