Is Technology Really Reliable?

[CaptainAce$$]

As the title says, do you think technology is reliable. Or is sometimes the old fashioned pen and paper the better option? Discuss it here.

[Recursion]

I always take a backup plan with me if I go do a presentation or something, but I'm more than happy to rely on my iPad to pull up my lecture notes and things throughout the day.

This also holds true at work, if the network goes down we have a few mission critical applications that we rely on and some cloud based services we need to use throughout the day, I'd say it's reliable but you should always have a backup plan in case something goes SNAFU.

[Chippiewill]

Considering I have RAID, local NAS backup and offsite backup I'd say it isn't reliable to the extent you can be complacent. But take simple steps to reduce your vulnerability and there's no reason not to place your trust in technology.

[peteyt]

I think technology is similar in a way to people - it's not perfect and it can make mistakes. However computers are also based on orders - you tell it to do something and it does it - if there is something wrong with the order unlike computers it won't work it out it'll just do it.

I don't think they will ever perfect it - things break, bugs happen, viruses happen. So as the above posters mentioned you need backups.

[Tomm]

I think you're asking the wrong question. Technology can be both reliable and unreliable. So can traditional pen and paper. How reliable something is really depends on how reliable you make it. Take for example your pen and paper example, now I could either only have one pen or take multiple pens. If I have multiple pens then I'd say that is reliable because it is highly improbable that all my pens would run out of ink or break at the same time. However, having a single pen is not very reliable because the probability of that breaking/running out of ink is quite high.

The same applies for technology, it is only as reliable as you make it. I'd say a better question would be to ask if the costs (I'm not just talking financial costs here) involved for ensuring reliability in computer based systems are low enough to continue to justify the use of technology over other methods. Now, I'd say in 99.9% of cases the answer to that is yes.

[Lee]

If it's used correctly and securely then it is reliable, it's when you start doing stupid or careless things that it isn't.

[peteyt]

If it's used correctly and securely then it is reliable, it's when you start doing stupid or careless things that it isn't.

I kind of disagree with things - technology can break without a warning - Buggy program etc. Sometimes issues happen that are beyond the user.

[Lee]

I kind of disagree with things - technology can break without a warning - Buggy program etc. Sometimes issues happen that are beyond the user.

Fair point I suppose, but still it doesn't mean it can't be relied on right? If there's a buggy program it can be fixed usually, like most things. If you back things up then that's a reliable counter-method to the issues you just raised