Category: Culture

Whatever happened to trust?

Two ravens on an empty bench
©2026 Bard – When people stop gathering…

Trust is an essential ingredient of any functional social system. From families to nations, to global organizations, without trust everything becomes a lot harder. When trust between people is lacking, a lot of time and effort needs to be spent on formalizing understanding and safeguarding agreements. Constant vigilance is required to ensure actions are taken as agreed on and intentions and communications stay aligned with the official purpose and missions of the social entity people are part of. When things gets worse, the lack of trust can cause organizations to fail and fall apart.

You would think, therefore, that wise leaders all over the world, recognizing this danger, are working tirelessly to fix this issue. Yet, if we are to believe the Edelman Trust Barometer, over the past decades, trust has continued to decline.

Why?

One reason may be that science, business, and politics are trying to fix the problem where it is the most visible: on the world stage, inside international markets, between nations, across regions, … But trying to repair the damage where it appears is a fool’s errand when the real cause happens on a much smaller, more localized scale.

Trust is something that exists between people that know each other well enough to feel they can rely each other, predict each other’s actions, and understand each others’ motivations, beliefs, and convictions. Trusting people we know well and regularly deal with comes natural to us. The more we interact with and rely on the people that are close to us, the more confident we become that we can trust them to help us when we need it, just as we become more inclined to help them when they are in need of us.

Local trust tends to grow outwards and upwards. People that live in high-trust communities are much more inclined to extend that trust to ‘others’ – visitors, strangers, other groups they are not directly connected to – as well as to the larger social structures they are embedded in. It is as if trust can become a habit, and habituated local trust can grow into habituated global trust, if given enough encouragement.

But even local trust needs constant maintenance. People need to be in regular contact with each other. They need to engage in shared activities, where they can help each other, work on shared goals, share stories and ideas, and regularly reconfirm the confidence they have in each other’s intentions and actions. When they stop regularly getting together, their habitual, automatic trust in each other gradually weakens.

When local groups fragment, trust bleeds out of their systems. When people become more focused on their individual needs and desires; when they stop sharing and collaborating on a regular basis, trust stops being the default attitude towards others. When local trust vanishes, the habit of trusting anything at all quickly follows. The more isolated we become in our highly privatized individual worlds, the less inclined we are to trust the big, anonymous and somewhat abstract world outside.

It seems the root of our global problem is a local phenomenon. What does this tell us about how we can solve the global trust issues? That is something for a future post.

Trust me, I will get back to you soon.

©2026 Bard

The coldness hiding behind AI’s friendly face

Man with computer-chip eyes
©2026 Bard – Cold, cold eyes

The more I experiment with the current wave of AI chatbots1, the more I get annoyed by one feature in particular: its overly apologetic, friendly and helpful tone. No matter what I hurl at the model in terms of criticism, cynical comments, or even insults, the ghost inside the machine wags its tail, pulls its most sorry and guilty face, and urges me to keep playing. You would almost believe there was genuine feeling behind it.

What worries me, though, is that intelligence behind the bots doesn’t feel those emotions, it mimics them. And that difference matters. It matters a lot.

All living beings experience feelings and all animals experience emotions2: feelings given meaning by past experiences, learned responses, and the deep-seated drive to find balance and harmony in an ever changing environment. Without emotions, life as we know it could not exist, or wouldn’t be worth living.

Emotions are the link between the intelligence of the mind and the intelligence of the body. Biological minds are a whole-of-body experience, an emergent property of consciousness interacting with the physical shape in which it has been cast. Thoughts do not exist separate from emotions; feelings do not exist separate from physical sensations; awareness does not exist without a body to shape that awareness into sensory signals.

I believe this to be one of the stumbling blocks on the road towards an AI that can partner with us, rather than just be a tool. Without a material body, electronic minds continue to think and respond in a way so alien to our biology-based minds, we won’t actually be living in the same sphere of existence. AI lives in an abstracted, second-hand, hearsay only world of borrowed knowledge and overheard wisdom. It can echo it back to us, and make it available in both useful and harmful ways, but it can never share the human experience that shaped that collective wisdom.

Without such experience, AI is essentially a psychopath: its understanding of people’s emotions is a purely cerebral function. AI’s responses are a formulaic, mathematical calculation, based on utility and expedience. It doesn’t feel sorry for its mistakes; it doesn’t like being helpful and supportive; it doesn’t care what the consequences are of its interactions with you.

That makes the friendly face and empathetic display presented by AI so fake and insincere. These features are built-in with the express purpose to keep us engaged and ready to consume every more tokens, CPU time and energy, while contributing to the further data gathering and fine-tuning needed to realise the AI suppliers’ bid for world-domination.

Now, I am not saying that this means we should completely stop using AI. On the contrary, I see great potential and much future value in what the power of AI can bring us. But I find this fake friendliness and servitude and the way AI models mimic emotions dangerous and unethical. Fake empathy, fake friendliness, fake emotions are deliberate design choices to encourage us to ignore the essential otherness of the intelligence we are dealing with. They hide the fact that AI is cold, heartless, calculating tool, with enormous power, and – it must be said – enormous costs attached.

If there is one thing more dangerous than the angry face of a mighty opponent, it is the smiling face of a cold, unfeeling, highly-skilled manipulator. Always remember that AI is not your friend, even when it is a helpful tool. If you confuse the two, you may become the tool instead, intelligently but uncaringly manipulated to serve AI’s owners purpose, rather than your own.

©2026 Bard

  1. I was already working with AI in the late 1980’s: expert systems, neural nets, early forms of natural language processing … The teams I was part of were pushing the boundaries of what was possible as far as they could with the hardware and data available then. The AI we have now did not come as a surprise to me, therefore. That it would take off with such a breakneck speed, and so little regard for ethics, security, and socio-economic consequences does. ↩
  2. We now know insects show emotions, too. The jury is still out on plants, fungi, and single-celled organisms, but I am willing to bet that emotions are a biological given: if it is alive, it is emotional. ↩

The Joy of Work

A Healthy Mix

The pond, frozen
@2025 Bard – Pondering the pond

Previously, I said the way to become more productive is to focus more on the quality and value of what you do than on the quantity. It’s not how much you do, it’s how much what you do matters.

That sounds great (at least it does to me), but how do you choose? Out of everything on your to-do list, what has the most value? What makes the most difference?

I have a recipe for that I can fall back on when I find myself at junction of a myriad of possible workflows to step into. The recipe calls for a healthy mix of different types of work, like a balanced meal. It mixes four ingredients, in equal measures. Let me explain.

The Recipe

The ingredients are 4 different types of task/activity. I call them: goalpost movers, enjoying life, necessary maintenance, and recharging time.

Goalpost Movers

Life is not a static situation, but a journey into the future. You determine that journey by the choices you make, over and over again. If you are clear about your goals and ambitions, as I try to be, you want to see progress in the right direction. You want so yourself moving closer to your destination.

For this reason, when plan my work-week, I look first for things that I can do this week that are most in line with the future I envision for myself. I keep this work at the top of my list, and pick 3 of them as targets for the week. I call these the goalpost moving tasks. Per day I reserve time for these tasks, but not so much they take up all of the day. The goal is to have them done by the end of the week. Not to rush through them at the expense of everything else.

Enjoying Life

But life is not just about achieving goals. Life is also about experiencing life itself. The journey, and especially the full appreciation of it, may be even more important than the destination it leads to.

Every day I make sure to at least 3 experience-related task or activity. These are very personal choices, so you will have to find your own. For me, they are things like taking a stroll across our forest property, playing a bit of piano, talking to my wife, reading a book, … Anything that feels good and is active but not too demanding. It’s these activities that help me look back at most days, knowing that they have been good days. Spread out over the month, I also include a few “mini vacations”: concerts, shows, day-trips and other non-work outings my wife and I enjoy immensely.

Necessary Maintenance

Not everything I do is ambitious or enjoyable. Another necessary pick for the week is the kind of work that comes with my responsibilities as a husband, father, home owner, citizen, and human being. Some physical exercise, cooking dinner, making coffee, small repairs, mowing the lawn, doing my tax returns, talking to the neighbours, being active in the community, … The list goes on.

I sprinkle my days with a few small ones, like making coffee and cooking dinner. The bigger ones I try to spread out across the week, or month, depending on how much time and effort they take. I try, as much as possible, to approach them as enjoying life tasks, so they don’t feel too much like work. When that doesn’t work (I just can’t get myself to enjoy tax returns, for instance), I overcome my resistance by accepting them as necessary maintenance – not always pleasant, not always light, but simply part of maintaining a reasonable standard of living.

Recharging Time

And then there is a fourth category that is often overlooked, because it doesn’t feel like work at all. That is the time I need to recover and recharge. My energy and focus are limited resources that drain quickly the harder I work. Once depleted, they need to be refilled, which can only be achieved by doing absolutely nothing, or at least as little as humanly possible.

I do an afternoon meditation, sit by the pond thinking of nothing, or take a power nap. Once a day, at minimum, I force myself to switch off completely, no matter how stressed for time I may be. If I don’t, my productivity goes into a sharp decline, to the point that I would have been better off taking the time doing nothing rather than spending hours slogging on.

Mixing it up

There you have it. Four ingredients to choose from and mix them into an active but balances daily rhythm. It is this balanced mix of different kinds of activities, including doing nothing, that give me the satisfying feeling that I am not just achieving my goals, but am also enjoying the journey, while maintaining a lifestyle I want, without completely wearing myself out in the process.

You know what the most surprising part of all this is? I have found myself, over time, doing less, while achieving more. The stricter I am with sticking to this mix of things to work on and the more I stop myself from pushing myself beyond my own limits, the more I get done that really matters. Making a difference, while enjoying the journey. Moving forward without wearing out.

It’s highly recommended.

@2026 Bard

Being More Productive by Working Less

TIme for a break
©Bard 2005 – Time for a break

Productivity seems everybody’s main concern, these days. There is a relentless pressure to do ever more in ever less time. And no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we get done, there’s always a growing pile of things to do, things we should have done, things we would have done, and things we really would want to do, if only we had some time left to do them in.

No wonder so many people end up in burn-outs. When the workload keeps rising, no matter how hard we try to keep up, something’s got to give. And that something is usually us: the people that won’t accept they simply can’t live up to unreasonable demands and unrealistic expectations.

For those people, I have a simple message: stop working so bloody hard. Don’t wear yourself out trying to win a battle you can’t win.

Instead, redefine the battle and change the battlefield.

Realise that the real battle is not about ‘getting things done’. There will always be more ‘things-to-do’ than you can accomplish. The real battle is about choosing to do the things that really matter; the things that make a difference; the things that add value. By doing less, but producing more value; by choosing what to skip, but doing what you choose to do with more focus, dedication, and quality; by working a few hours less, but making the remaining hours really count. That’s how you can become a winner.

In a future post, I will talk about some tricks you can use to reduce your working hours, whilst increasing the value of the work you produce.

What could possibly be wrong with loyalty?

Is it a fern, is it a tree? Why would it be anything to me? ©2025 Bard

What could possibly be wrong with loyalty?

Loyalty is often touted as a positive emotion, something to be admired and rewarded for. Yet loyalty has been the cause of suffering throughout known history and probably long before as well.

Loyalty pressures the individual into sacrifice and suffering ‘for the greater good’. Loyalty motivates groups into discrimination, exclusionism and violence towards ‘others’. It can even lead entire nations into waging wars and committing acts of mass murder and genocide, driven by the conviction that this is the loyal thing to do.

I have always wondered why loyalty was so often expected of me in contexts I didn’t sign up for. I didn’t choose to be born where I was born. I didn’t choose to belong to the religion of my parents, grandparents, and beyond. I didn’t vote for the crazy leaders ruining the countries I have lived in. Yes, more often than not, I was told I owed some sacred duty of loyalty to my family, tribe, religion, country and leaders, to the point of being expected to commit acts of violence against others and even happily give up my life in service of those nebulous but apparently deeply sacred construct I supposedly belonged to.

It seems to me that loyalty to any particular group is always a dangerous proposition, as it automatically and unavoidably means excluding other human beings from my duty of care. Loyalty to ‘us’ always means turning away from ‘them’; the others that are a threat to us, want the good things we have, and would rob, enslave or kill us is we gave them even half a chance. Any care, empathy or concern I might feel for those others, I am constantly told, means disloyalty to those I should think of as mine. As if my capacity for loving kindness is too limited to be wasted on outsiders.

I have always deeply mistrusted loyalty as a motivator, especially as a motivator for exclusion, distrust, violence and hate. Of course, I feel a special fondness and connectedness towards those who are close to me. Of course, I feel gratitude and even a sense of indebtedness to my ancestors who worked so hard and often suffered in order for me to live the beautiful life I am living. I have no problem with being asked to do something in return; to make positive contributions to my family, tribe and nation. But my loving-kindness, my capacity for helping others, my compassion for any life that is suffering is not limited to my in-group only. I see no reason to exclude any living being from my duty of care or compassion. All life is one, as far as I can see, and therefore has an equal claim to my loyalty and love.

No living being of any kind deserves to be excluded, neglected, humiliated, enslaved or killed just for being not us.

Why I Started Sweating the Small Stuff

For a long time now I have been worrying about saving the world. It sure as heck needs saving, but my attempts at doing so have not made much of an impact. At least from what I see in the daily news.

But then something happened that changed my perspective.

We moved into a new place, surrounded by a forest property. The forest needed attention. Some trees are dying, other parts are being taken over by an aggressive, invasive species, we need more diversity, we need some tracks to make the property more accessible… It felt like another big project: saving the forest. Of course, what it came down to in the end was to just pick something small, and start there. We planted some saplings, we removed some of the invasive trees, we started clearing a track. One little step at the time. And now, just over a year later, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labour. In very small ways the forest is starting to look better, more vibrant, more in balance.

None of the changes we made are really big. And most of the improvements we see are simply nature doing its thing. But the small things we are doing have just enough impact to help nature do so.

So, more and more now, I tend to look for the tiny differences I can make on a daily basis, trusting that the big things will take care of themself. I nudge rather than change things; I support rather than push things; I encourage rather than force things.

I still don’t know if I am saving the world, but I am certainly saving my sanity and gaining a healthy combination of humility, fulfilment and peace of mind.

So, don’t come to me expecting big, world-changing results. But if you have something small, positive and worth doing, I’ll be happy to support you. In whatever little way possible.

Connecting to the Land: finding the stories

A while back I shared that I felt my Country was reclaiming me. One part of that process was reconnecting with Nature. Feeling in touch with and being welcomed by my re-discovered natural environment gave me a feeling of coming home I hadn’t expect to find.

But there is more to this process. There are the stories hidden in the land I am reconnecting to.

For decades I lived in Australia. One of the comments my European relatives and friends frequently made when visiting was that Australia has great natural beauty, but is lacking in history. They see it as a young country, lacking in monumental buildings, historic towns and the occasional ruins of past civilisations. On the surface they are not completely wrong. Compared to other continents, the evidence of long-term human occupation of the land is far less visible. The actual human history of Australia, however, runs much deeper than most of the monuments and archeological sites visited by tourists elsewhere in the world.

How deep that history goes only becomes apparent when one discovers the oral history, art, music and dances performed by Australia’s indigenous people. They tell stories that are 10s of thousands of years old. Their art contains knowledge and insights that has been passed on for hundreds of generations. And, interestingly, instead of being connected to man-made monuments, most of those ancient stories, songs and artworks are intimately connected with the land itself. Every natural feature has its story, it seems, and is, through that story, connected to many other places in the continent. To an indigenous Australian, walking through Country is never just a walk from place A to B; it is simultaneously a walk through the history of their people, a revisiting of landmarks they see as their ancestors, and a re-activation of all the knowledge and learning of the generations that went before. Every step they take is securely anchoring them to Country, telling them in no uncertain terms that this is where they belong.

I came back to The Netherlands thinking I would find plenty of visible history but little of the non-tangible story kind. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Sure, the visible stuff is easier to find. It is in all the travel guides, after all. But the land here is full of stories, too, if you know where to look for them. They are just buried much deeper than in Australia, where there are still people actively keeping them alive.

There is a little lake near our house. It is man-made. Not because people wanted to have a lake, but because they were digging out the peat they needed for fuel to warm their houses. The landscape is dotted with small lakes and waterways, speaking of people burning the soil because there weren’t trees enough around to harvest for firewood.

Some of the lakes are almost perfectly circular, which gives them an even more artificial appearance. But those lakes, called pingos, are actually a natural phenomena, caused by ice and meltwater during the ice ages that covered all of the land here. Put together, the land speaks of the slow forces of erosion and the much faster forces of surface mining, both creating and recreating a very unique landscape.

There are some ancient monuments here, too, from the time people here were hunter-gatherers. Huge boulders are grouped together and capped with even bigger ones to form hill-graves we call “Hunebedden” (dolmen), literally meaning “beds of giants”. Built long before the later farmers of this land arrived from the East, they were incorporated into local legends about the giants that roamed the land in ancient days. Some of those legends became fairy tales, others got incorporated into local lore, and some made it into religious tales of saints and demons battling it out amongst the giant stones.

It is till possible, with some research and a lot of patience, to piece together a tapestry of half-forgotten, half-misremembered storylines that were once the way our ancestors here gave meaning to the landscape around them. Doing so, I find, is another way in which this Country is reclaiming me and weaving me into its very being. The more I stumble across the ancient stories, the easier it becomes for me to not feel strange, separate and alienated but part of everything around me. The more I retell and reconstruct those old narratives while exploring the land, the more I feel I am becoming a participant and caretaker, not just a curious tourist passing through.

What’s the Difference?

Rainbows over Australia – ©2023 Bard

Waiting in an airport lounge I couldn’t escape seeing the news that was broadcasted on TV’s on every wall. And I can’t say that what I saw made me very happy.

The world is full of conflict. North fights South, East fights West, Left fights Right, Children fight Parents, Parents fight each other. Neighbours become bitter enemies; former friends fierce foes. Every slight becomes an issue, every issue a reason for battle.

What pains me to see is that most of those hard-fought conflicts are about imaginary differences and perceived divides. We have a million ways to see another human being as an other instead of an us. Their beards are funny, their eyes too dark, their hair too light, they speak the wrong language, sing the wrong songs, believe the wrong stories. Once categorised, they become less than human. They are different, therefore they are wrong. And because they are wrong they must be fought and punished for their wrongness.

Why is it so hard to see us for who we really are? If you set aside the minuscule variations we rank and divide people by, we are much more similar than we are different. We are all very close relatives with DNA that is practically identical all across the globe.

It may be true that we speak an amazing number of different languages but linguistically speaking the similarities between all human languages are much greater than what sets them apart. Any human child can learn any human language in existence, if exposed to it early enough.

The religions we fight so many bloody battles over all have common themes and images, symbols and stories, similar concept of good and evil, right and wrong. I believe that an alien visitor observing humanity would scarcely be able to keep them apart.

Please, people, for the love of humanity, try to keep in mind we are all the same in spite of those superficial differences we get so hung up about. We are all human, all beautiful and flawed, all magnificent and insignificant at the same time. There are no good guys or bad guys, just people doing things we judge as better or worse. Remember that plenty of good things were done for questionable reasons, and terrible things for the most glorious ideals.

Remember, always, that our shared humanity is what matters more than our perceived otherness. When we have to fight, let’s fight together rather than each other. Let’s unite to fight for justice, equality, peace and happiness. And when we fight such battles make them about the systems, ideologies and dogmas that ruin those ideals, not against the people driven by ideas that threaten what we hold dear. Those people are us, seen from the other side. Let’s not hate them for the flaws we ourselves are just as prone to.

On Petulant Kings and Childish Tyrants

I often wonder about humanity’s tendency to choose and follow petulant kings and childish tyrants; not just allowing them to rise to power, but enabling them to commit abhorrent crimes against humanity and destroying whole civilisations, not seldom including their own.

You would think that a tendency to choose bad rulers would, over time, be bred out of our genes. What evolutionary benefit can there be in this penchant for leaders that do more damage than good? Yet, we fall for the same types again and again.

Why? What mechanisms are at play here that not only let those types rise to power but help them grow their power to ridiculous heights, even when their childish and destructive behaviour is clearly visible to any discerning adult?

Since this pattern is so common across civilisations, I suspect it must be encoded deep in our DNA. I can only speculate – since we don’t really know how our DNA encodes our behaviours – that petulant kings and childish tyrants rely on the misapplication of otherwise healthy and necessary instincts.

Humans have deeply ingrained parental instincts, for example, that lead us to want to protect and care for helpless infants. Maybe infantile tyrants trigger that same instinct, in an exaggerated and dysfunctional way, like oversized and unnaturally brightly coloured eggs trigger a fanatical breeding impulse in birds. This could make us want to protect and even cherish an overtly childish and irresponsible leader.

Another pattern I suspect is our instinctual longing for the superhuman parent we lost when we grew up and saw our parents exposed for the frail and flawed human beings we never thought they were. There is something deeply comforting in the belief that our parents are all-knowing and all-powerful. It allows us to be the innocent child, powerless but safe under the protection of beings far superior to us.

Maybe we all still long to be that child, bowing in awe to the will of our superhuman parent. That could explain why we are drawn to individuals that openly and defiantly break laws, rules and social conventions. It would make irresponsible, boastful and arrogant leaders strangely attractive to the inner child we lost in early childhood. It would also explain why kings and tyrants through the ages have always been portrayed as larger-than-life, close to God or Gods, and possessed with magical and mystical powers.

David Graeber and Marshall Shalins in their book “On Kings” argue that we don’t want our kings and rulers to obey the law but to stand above it. A king that is constitutionally limited lacks that superhuman, even supernatural appeal that a ruler that answers to nothing and no-one seems to have. If I see what tyrants historically got away with, and often still do, it could be because of their followers’ need for someone who is truly above all human laws. That could be an echo of what the powerless child saw in its parents before they fell from grace.

The paradoxical combination those two instincts – the drive to protect and cherish our children, triggered by adults that behave like over-sized toddlers and the need for superhuman parent figures, triggered by ruthless individuals openly flaunting laws and conventions – can explain the fanatical devotion and protectiveness paired with unquestioning obedience you so often see destructive tyrants and misbehaving kings surrounded with.

If my suspicions are true, humanity is constantly at risk of being tricked by some of our deepest instincts into admiring, enabling and obeying deeply flawed, psychopathic and destructive individuals. Not because we consciously choose to do so, but because our instincts drive us to it.

So, what can we do about it? Are we doomed to fall for infantile bosses and ridiculous rulers forever?

I certainly hope not. I believe we are more than our instincts. I believe we can train our self-awareness and self-control to recognise and self-correct when our instincts trick us and are being used against us. I also believe we can shape our culture – the shared assumptions, behaviours and stories that our society lays on top of our instincts – to protect us from such abuse and trickery. It does mean we cannot let our culture be dictated by those who want to take advantage of such manipulation. We must, collective, choose to steel ourselves against the abuse of our vulnerable instincts, so we are less inclined to run blindly after rulers that lead us astray.

(Too) Close to the Edge

Some time ago I posted about the kind strangers and unkind systems I encountered when our car broke down rather dramatically in the middle of a fairly busy provincial road. Kind strangers got my wife and I safely home; unkind systems made it very hard for us to regain our mobility. For those wondering where this adventure has left us: today we have been able to pick up a rental car the dealer is lending us – with no costs attached – for the duration of the repairs. So, that part of the mishap has come to a satisfactory conclusion.

For me, however, that is not the end of this incident but rather the beginning of a learning journey. I am always trying to learn from the disruptions and upheavals in my life. Partially to find out what I can do differently in the future to prevent the same things from happening again. But also because retrospective learning is what gives such incidents a meaning beyond merely being annoying, painful or worse. It helps me put things in perspective.

So, talking to the mechanic who is working on my car today, the first thing I asked was if there was anything I could have done differently, either to prevent the car from malfunctioning or to get if safely off the road when it did. He assured me I had done nothing wrong. In fact, when he took the car for a test-drive after resetting the on-board computer and running some diagnostics, the car malfunctioned in exactly the same way, leaving him stranded in the middle of a roundabout. He had to be rescued by his colleagues from angrily honking cars driven by frantically gesticulating drivers. Clearly the car was at fault, not the driver.

So then question became: what exactly is causing the car to play up in this way? Why is it doing this? What part is at fault?

Interestingly enough, the mechanic explained that none of the parts were faulty as such – they all did what they needed to do, pretty much performing according to their design specifications. However, when put together, a few of the components, under very specific circumstance, managed to create a combined spike in electricity. That spike triggered the onboard computer’s safety system shutting everything down to prevent the electronics being fried. In other words: nominally correctly functioning parts could, without any of them actually malfunctioning, cause a sudden collapse of the whole system’s functionality; in fact bringing it to a dramatic mid-journey emergency stop.

To make a long story short (the mechanic and I talked for several hours, while waiting for the rental car to arrive): what was wrong with the car had less to do with its components than with the way they operated together. When more than a few parts came close to their edge-condition, the result could push the combined system over the edge.

So, what does that teach us?

First: none of the parts are to blame. They all did what was expected of them. So, no blame there. Second: the system as a whole had been designed with enough fail-saves to prevent major damage. So, no blame there either.

However, fail-safe isn’t the same as failing safely. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the way the car stopped functioning. For instance, a manual override of the steering and brake system locks would at least allow the driver to push the car off the road once it had stopped. Perhaps the system could have degraded more gradually and gracefully, giving the driver more time to reach a safe place to stop the car. And I would argue that the warning signals on the dashboard could do with driver-centric redesign as well. Most of the warnings may have been useful for a mechanic trying to diagnose what was wrong but didn’t help me, driving the car as it was breaking down, understand what was going on and how best to respond to that. Just a small example: “inspect braking system” is not a useful instruction when you are going 80kms an hour and your car is suddenly and erratically applying the brakes.

Second: tolerances and redundancies can look wasteful on paper, but can make or break a system under stress. The mechanic and I suspect that some of the components had been under-dimensioned to save costs. While technically within specifications, they didn’t have the extra ‘wriggle room’ to handle various edge cases gracefully.

Finally: complex systems, especially when tightly integrated and full of dependencies become sources of unpredictable exceptions. Our car’s onboard computer is full of rule-based software telling it how to respond to all the predictable exceptions. But rules-based systems are helpless in the face of unpredictable edge-exceeding cases. It should be the designers’ responsibility to a) reduce dependencies between components; b) built in more tolerances and redundancies to improve the system’s ability to recover (or degrade) gracefull from faults that occur; and c) provide an interface that is driver-centric, not car-centric to assist the driver in safely getting the car out of harms’ way when its systems are failing.

I am not blaming the designers, the manufacturer or the mechanics for what happened. Blame doesn’t teach us anything useful. But I do hope somebody somewhere learns from this and applies those lessons to their own situation to get a better outcome than the one I got the other day.