A few days ago, my wife and I were leaving our apartment building. I pressed the button to open the door automatically. Nothing happened. We can’t leave the building, maybe we just jumped out of the window. In the end, he happened to be in the doorman outside and managed to open the door manually. He explained that there was a power outage. The anti-failure system, which also works electronically, has also failed. The power outage lasted for two hours.
I thought of all doors in London and other places that can now be opened and closed automatically: train doors, car doors, elevator doors, supermarket doors. Thankfully, the door of the airplane can’t open and close automatically.
Today, my remote control key can lock and unlock my car doors automatically. I searched on Google to find out the principle: “Modern key fobs work through RFID. RFID is a smart barcode system that uses electromagnetic fields to identify and track data on tags containing stored information. Then the information is transmitted through radio waves.”
Obviously, My key has become a source of risk: “If the digital keychain is hacked or copied electronically, then cybercriminals can steal your car! Now researchers have discovered that’key cloning’ is not only possible, but also a A serious threat.”
So far, the power outage has been partial and temporary. India has experienced two major power outages, which occurred in Delhi in July 2012 and Mumbai in October 2020. The power outage in Delhi affected 620 million people (approximately 8% of the world’s population). In Mumbai, all suburban train services were stopped and passengers were trapped in the cars; financial services were suspended; online exams had to be cancelled.
The permanent blackout that shuts down the entire world has always been a favorite theme of science fiction. In EM Foster’s 1909 short story “The Big Machine Stopped”, the survivors of an (unexplainable) ecological disaster live underground. Transportation, communication, production, and services are all driven by electricity, and there is no contact between people: music is continuously transmitted through pipes to the immobile cells of the residents, and the bed will be lowered when the button is pressed.
”Don’t all your lecturers see that we are dying, and the only thing that really lives here is the machine,” the hero Kuno told his sleepy mother. “We created the machine to realize our wishes. But we can’t let it do what we want now.”
Then, the machine began to collapse. Hiccups were mixed in the pipe music; the “virtual” lecture was out of power; the artificial food became moldy; the air became dirty; the bath water started to smell; the sleeping device malfunctioned. Then one day, the machine stopped working completely. The end of civilization. The panicked crowd filled the tunnels leading to the surface, but the blocked ventilation shafts had also stopped working, trapping them underground. Eternal night comes.
Since Foster wrote his story, people have explored this idea more. In René Balhaber’s 1943 novel Destruction, electricity suddenly disappears, and with it chaos, disease, and famine. Recently, in Tim Mohn’s “Infinite Details”, cyber terrorism shut down the Internet, and the global production, supply chain, communications, energy, travel, and national security systems were shut down with it. The people returned to a barbaric state. The same is true for Mark Ellsberg’s “Light Control”, a catastrophic thriller about the collapse of European and American power grids caused by cyber attacks.
The apocalyptic collapse of this scale is still fictional. At least there are many places where there is no Internet and no infrastructure support. But the number of these places is declining steadily and rapidly, partly because of the efforts of social media and tech giants.
The slowly increasing threat is that people who are accustomed to “automatically” providing services will gradually lose their ability to resist natural and man-made “impacts.” They have lost the memory of how they did things in the past, have little or no knowledge of how the processes they rely on actually work, and they feel helpless and panic even in the face of minor disturbances from “normal” life.
They created the gods of machines, or, as scholars explained more soberly, they lived in a “scientific and technological paradigm” and were governed by its “necessity framework”. The machine promises to improve our lives, but what if the door fails to open the meeting?
