Two events in early May – the bungled attempt to set off a car bomb in Manhattan’s Times Square and the near catastrophe on Wall Street on May 6 – perfectly illustrate what we told our clients in a white paper eight years ago: they will increasingly exist in what we called “an error/terror world.”  The Times Square fiasco was an almost farcical combination of terror and error.  What might have been a massacre was averted largely because of the incompetence of the perpetrator.  There were also additional errors by the FBI and Emirates Airline.

On the stock exchanges on May 6, something triggered a massive sell-off by mindless software programs.  (A human, by the way, would have seen immediately that the sell orders were inappropriate.)

The combination of hate-driven terrorism and incompetency-fueled errors seems likely to increasingly characterize the world we all live in.  In some ways, as in the Times Square incident, they might counteract each other.  But it would not be wise to count on this too much.  It seems more likely, given current trends, that they will reinforce each other, multiplying the potential harm each can cause.

A major contributing factor is the woefully inadequate attention we have paid to the human/machine interface.  The critical need is to make sure that human judgment is not subordinated to speed and efficiency.  As someone once said, efficiency is doing things right, but effectiveness is doing the right things. As what happened on Wall Street demonstrated, software programs are good at the former but not necessarily the latter.  That is why, for at least the foreseeable future, we will have to keep humans in the loop.