The Software Industry Is Still the Problem

Around the time computers were old enough to drink, software engineering guru Gerald Weinberg said: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." This is not a plotline science fiction authors have ever neglected. Actually, some titles are still worth a trip to the library: for example, Poul Anderson's Sam Hall from 1953, which shows how too much reliance on "infallible" computer surveillance can turn into an autoimmune collapse for a nation-state, or, for that matter, any large organization. At the more obscure end of the spectrum, there is Swedish Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfvén, publishing in Swedish under the pseudonym Oluf Johannesson, with Sagan om den stora Datamaskinen [Tale of the Big Computer] from 1966. As with almost all science fiction pieces, however, they miss the future by a wide margin.