The lessons of a PIM fail

I had an interesting–and terrible–experience this past week. My email/calendar/addressbook/to-do list system had a catastrophic crash. For basically a week it just stopped working. Or, almost worse, it worked sporadically and unreliably.

I was suddenly caught without my external memory field, without reliable communications, and without any way to reliably deal with the information that was coming into my life. I had come to depend on this technology, and then it failed.

A lot of things fell through the cracks: phone calls, doctor’s appointments, email exchanges.

[For those of you wondering, I did manage to recover the data. But if you sent me email last week and didn't hear back, it might be a good idea to resend it!]

The result, though, was an opportunity to ponder, first hand, one of the darker sides of technology…

My first reaction, honestly, was to feel a deeper sympathy for the Cassandras of the digital age who say that we will become dependent on our technologies, and if, heaven forbid, we ever lose them we will become helpless.

Well, OK. My first reaction was actually a long stream of obscenities. But my first rational reaction was  to think about the Cassandra argument.

And, yes, it was an awful week, and some important things got lost. But I also realized (once again) that the Cassandra argument has a fatal flaw in it:

The Cassandras of the digital age don’t weigh the conditional probabilities in their calculation.

What I realized is that, yes, this week was awful because of a failure of technology and my dependence on it. But that was one week of one year.

The other 51 weeks of this year–and the 52 weeks of the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that–were much better because of the technology. Much much better.

To be sure, the Cassandras are right that we have to take steps to protect ourselves from the most catastrophic failures of technology. Backing up my hard drive and iPhone regularly, for example, made this much less of a fatal meltdown than it could have been.

But you have to weigh the likelihood and frequency of failure into the cost/benefit calculation of becoming “dependent” on technology.

I was once at a meeting where Alan Kay argued that science was more important than literature by asking:

If you were stranded on a tropical island, would you rather have a topological map of the island, or a map of Tolkein’s Middle Earth?

To which my friend and colleague Rick Borovoy answered:

Most of the time when I am on a tropical island, I am at a beach resort, and there I’d rather have the Lord of the Rings than a science textbook.

[Added Jan 30] For the record, Alan doesn’t remember it quite that way, and I am not trying to put words in his mouth! See the comments below….

But, yes, when my Microsoft Exchange server fails, I would rather have my datebook on paper. Most of the time, though, I am much better off trying to manage information electronically.

Similarly, when people argue that kids need to learn basic math facts so they can give the right change if the cash register breaks down, you have to ask what they are giving up so they can be prepared for the relatively few times they might face that particular kind of emergency….