The crash of the National bank's computer system illustrates just how dependent we are on the silicon chip - and the electricity that powers it - to maintain a normal way of life.
When the system came to a halt and the ATM's stopped delivering money and the EFTPOS system declined to let us pay for groceries and petrol - our world virtually came to a stop. We could not travel or even feed ourselves !
The ramifications will be felt for weeks - long after the fault has been rectified. Some people will be forced into a legal breach that is not their fault - but then the law that enforces payment dates and consequences was not designed to accommodate a systems failure. Buying shares - settling a home purchase - all sorts of transactions contain an escape clause if payments are not made precisely on the due date.
In this electronic age, disruption of the money supply could even be a legitimate weapon of war. What better way to cause chaos in a country than to attack the electricity supply system - or to hack into the computers that manage the money supply.
What happened this past weekend proves that we are vulnerable to either a normal malfunction or a deliberate attack on the electronic complex that is modern living. If we are so clever that we can develop such systems, then surely we need to take this risk into account and have back-ups in place to share the load.
This weekend should be a wake-up call to evaluate the entire system !
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