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"This implies that if you want to open or shut part of your dam, some guy with muscles has to go out and physically move the relevant parts. It won't work at al
by rsync 11y ago
"This implies that if you want to open or shut part of your dam, some guy with muscles has to go out and physically move the relevant parts. It won't work at all for heavy things, or things in inaccessible locations (dams are both of these, actually)."
Yes, that is exactly what it implies.
This brings with it two very important and extremely valuable effects:
First, it means there is a human observing, on a regular basis, the behavior of the system - someone "has a feel" for how things work and can (with the intellect and perception of a human brain) "sense" when something is not right.
Second, it means, in the Taleb sense, that someone has "skin in the game". In the same way that I would be very disturbed if a commercial airliner had remote pilots, I would be similarly disturbed if a dam or a power plant had remote operators.
Finally, this human, locally present operator or operators probably shouldn't have Internet access - even on personal devices. There's no reason for it and it only adds risk and attack vectors. If you run the nuclear plant you can check twitter when you get home.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoI think you missed the part of my point where this can't be done. You can't hire someone to go open the dam himself and be crushed by the water that comes out. Nor can you hire people to move things that are too heavy for a person, or 100 people, to move.
- rsync 11y agoYes, certainly I am not suggesting that we sacrifice humans to go open the sluice gates manually. I am talking about doing it without computers. These things were done prior to computers with relays and switches and even status lights and a monitoring board, etc. I'm advocating that we take out all of the general purpose capabilities as well as the ability to interoperate. A human being flicks a switch.
- bifrost 11y agoWe'd have to add a secondary remote interlock capability to prevent an out of control operator from doing something aberrant. Infrastructure without automation is hopefully dead, we just need to be smarter about how we accomplish it.
- rsync 11y ago"Infrastructure without automation is hopefully dead" No, no ... the "without automation" part is the entire point. If a system is automated, then nobody has skin in the game - the way the pilot and copilot of your airplane do. The outcomes we want are the outcomes we get when the operator is the first one to go if something goes wrong. It is in that interaction that we can rely on the (amazing, irreproducible, beautiful) ability of the human brain to recognize patterns and make brilliant deductive leaps. That's just the very thing we want.