Last Friday’s news was dominated by the ‘biggest IT outage in history’, as a bug in a routine software update cascaded into a global crisis. Millions of computers were knocked out, thousands of flights cancelled, hospital operations postponed, television channels went off the air, payments systems crashed, supply chains froze. In short the digital foundations of our civilisation were shaken for hours and in some cases days.
There was no mention that I could see of E.M.Forster’s extraordinarily prescient novella The Machine Stops. Written in 1906, it depicts a humanity wholly dependent on machine-provided services. Then the Machine stops working, little by little at first, then completely. Civilisation comes to an end, ‘strangled in the garments [it] has woven’. Some survivors bereft of machinery are left pondering their future. Will some fool start the machine again? asks one. ‘Never’ another replies. ‘Humanity has learnt its lesson’.
Robert Skidelsky
Robert Skidelsky 