Can 'Hackstability' Save Civilization?

[GliderGuider]

10. As someone who got into computers back when hacking was still a respectable term

I love the idea. I also like his definition: "An intelligent, but rough-handed and expedient behavior aimed at manipulating a complicated reality locally for immediate gain." I hacked a lot of small programs (especially in assembly language) back in the late 70s and early 80s.

Then I went to work for a telecom company that was coding its second really big PBX, and I discovered something about hacking. It can work really well in small, isolated, one-off systems, but in big, complex, interwoven systems it's the kiss of death. It introduces instabilities that can show up far from where the hack was done, and it makes the entire system less and less maintainable.

Here's one example of such a hack that is killing the world: automated, ultra-high-speed commodity trading, also known as algorithmic trading or robotrading. It's a classic hack in terms of the definition he uses, and its consequences are devastating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

Hacking is a natural human tendency, but in a big system like a global industrial civilization it can be a suboptimal approach to change management...