Many years ago, I had the privilege of teaching in a one room school on the southern Labrador coast.  It was one of those learning experiences that stick with you for the rest of your life.  One moment occurred to me this morning as I began unfolding the incredible complexity of the world of intelligent devices, IoT,  and resiliency.

When I first got to the town on the coast, there was no electricity.  At the end of each day, the sun set and it got dark, and people lit lamps and lanterns.  They sat together, enjoying each other’s company, drinking, smoking, and talking about life.

A week or two after I arrived, several townsfolk rigged up a generator and ran wires to some of the houses.  They didn’t know a lot about electricity and so they ran a couple of wires and connected them to light sockets, and for a couple of hours each night we had electric light.

Not long after that one of the jury-rigged connections shorted and the lights went out.  There was general consternation.  Despite the fact that there were no refrigerators or televisions or even telephones, there were whines regarding what we were going to do for the evening without electric lights.  In just a few days they had forgotten a lifetime of kerosene lamps.

All the labor-saving devices that we have become accustomed to are addictive.  Can you even imagine not using your cell phone for a week or even a day or an hour?  And we are developing more and more devices at an unbelievable rate, devices that talk to other devices.  And they all talk to the magic, amorphous cloud.

So it has become reasonable to ask, what happens if the lights go out?  With all the dramatic weather events we are struggling with related to climate change, there are going to be more power outages.  That’s inevitable.  And when the power comes back, all those devices have to start up again, establish connections again, and start to control again.  They have to come back up right every single time.  And what happens to our world when they are down?  Security, data transfer, and control are all interrupted.

We can’t turn back into the tidal wave of technology.  We are going to have to develop technical as well as emotional resiliency on the run to stay ahead of it.  In Labrador we could go back to lighting the lanterns and sitting in the kitchen, chatting about life.  We don’t have that choice now.  We have to develop a technologically perfect world.

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