Goodness! This Brave New World Is Getting Pretty Scary -- Ice Storms, Hacking and More

So, the iced roads and freezing temps are now in day five down in Texas. For a decade we have been moving toward a greater interconnectedness of all our systems. The famed Internet of Things (IoT) was going to bring significant blessings and efficiencies to our lives. The current power outages in Texas are revealing some of the issues that will need to be hurdled if we are to enter the future with greater confidnce.

I've been worrying about practical matters with EVs for quite some time. Like, how do you recharge when the power is out? If we don't upgrade the power grid as fast as we force people into EVs, what then? We all know that ideas can be legislated faster than they can be implemented. Executive orders can be signed in a minute, with practical implementations half-baked and nowhere near ready. 

My personal big fear with EVs and automated cars has to do with tech. What happens when you have a problem? The history of the automobile includes a history of recalls. Recalls are not an isolated phenomenon. The industry is awash in them. In 2016 there were nearly 53 million recalls. I didn't even know they sold that many cars in 2016. (This was an unusual year because of the Takata airbag problem that drove the company into bankruptcy.)

The Texas power grid collapse, however, should be a wakeup call. If we are going to have an electric car future, let's make sure we have backup power grids and systems in place.  

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Another disturbing news item this month is the hacking that's been going on, and our inability to stop it. In Florida, somebody hacked the water supply of a city near Tampa and released 100-fold a chemical that is normally used to treat water, but now turned it harmful if not deadly.

A much more disturbing hack involved the breach of a number of federal agencies in 2020. There's a Wikipedia page on the cyberattack that penetrated thousands of organizations globally. The scary thing is that our government purportedly has the best cybersecurity protecting its assets, yet the cyberattacks went undetected for months.

The U.S. Senate intelligence committee is meeting next week to determine what happened and how. I mean no disrespect but how do these elected officials make decisions on these bleeding edge issues when they were essentially trained as lawyers, not IT experts. So they bring in experts, but how do they know which experts to listen to? It reminds me of Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth having to make decisions while being given contradictory counsel. 

I suppose this is not really a new phenomenon with regards to kings and presidents. This is, in part, what prompted me to write this piece titled Who Are Your Experts?  I originally addressed this to leaders on a much smaller scale, but the main point applies to all.

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And then we have the new strains of Covid with multiple experts weighing in until a single voice gets approved and the rest get cancelled. Times have changed. Are we no longer permitted to question conventional wisdom?

I grew up in the generation whose motto was Question Authority. Now that we/they are in authority, we're NOT allowed to question authority?