If you’re fond of delicious ironies, as I am, there’s a new book that will leave you positively gorged. It’s called Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems, and last week I got to speak with one of its authors, Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey.
The central irony that fascinates Palfrey and his co-author Urs Gasser, who directs the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, is that complex systems—especially those designed to support a high degree of interoperability—often bite back, achieving the reverse of what we intended. Think of the Challenger disaster as an example. The way NASA designed the shuttle system, more than 80 percent of the thrust required for liftoff came from the reusable solid rocket boosters, which consisted of four segments each (an arrangement that made it easier to refill the boosters with solid propellant between missions). Rubber O-rings between the segments were supposed to seal the joints and keep hot gas from escaping during launch. But January 28, 1986, was a very cold day at Cape Canaveral, and the O-rings turned out to be so brittle under those conditions they failed to hold the seal after ignition, allowing a gas leak that burned a hole in the main external fuel tank and destroyed the vehicle.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Can We Be Too Connected? A Harvard Scholar Explores Interoperability | Xconomy
