[technology] only as an adjunct to experience

Have a look at Nigel Sedgwick's business site and I think you'd agree - the man knows what he's talking about when it comes to technology. Predictably then, he was never going to be enamoured of this Luddite post of mine.

He argues that technology, after all, is only working to make life more livable for the average person, to streamline his daily commitments and that, of course, all the ramifications are factored in. In the case of the TGV, the whole product solution necessitates the purchase of new land to provide straighter tracks, a complete re-thinking of safety aspects and so on and so on.

All that is so but it still doesn't eliminate key concerns:

1] The bigger the project and the more teams involved in it's realization, the greater the chance of error and the more disastrous the consequences when it does happen;

2] The more that the technology replaces human intervention, the greater the reliance on the human intervention which created that technology in the first place - it just transfers the onus retrospectively;

3] The moment there is an agenda, e.g. first to the moon, the Great Race, the fastest train and so on, the more a gung-ho corner cutting and sometimes unreasoning demand for completion-by-date and mania to run it under budget seeps in - there are reputations involved. Reputation was very much part of the Tenerife disaster, for example.

4] Many disasters are the consequence of a chain of circumstances, rather than due to any one cause. Take the BC ferry disaster, for instance:

The Queen of the North sank about one hour after running full tilt into rocky Gil Island, 150 kilometres south of Prince Rupert, where it had left for an overnight passage to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island. How could the Queen of the North have strayed so far off course without anyone in charge of navigating and steering the ship noticing?

A report from B.C. Ferries' own inquiry into the mishap is expected to solve large parts of the mystery when it is released Friday, or Monday at the latest. But company investigators were hampered by the refusal of two key union crew members to answer questions.

Reports have suggested the ship may have been on autopilot when it ran into Gil Island, without a crucial course correction having been made to swing the vessel safely into mid-channel.

An early finding by the Transportation Safety Board also revealed that the monitor on the ship's new electronic chart system had been turned off because crew members did not know how to reduce its glare.

Sometimes, that's all it takes - glare - which wouldn't have entered the boffins' heads who'd designed the state-of-the-art chart system in the first place. How could it, with them not being in an operational capacity? This then comes down to project managers and team leaders. They can learn from the debacle so that it never occurs again but can't reverse the disaster itself.

A 320 kph TGV, French pride and one or two random factors such as glare is all it takes for a whole lot of failure analysis to ensue. Sorry Nigel but this Luddite remains unconvinced.