Humans vs Computers

Humans vs Computers

Hi all!

Today i review very interesting book.

HUMANS VS COMPUTERS written by author Gojko Adzic this book presents and explains many examples of how software influence our lives and gives very good advises for what to look and expect from modern software.

I loved the descriptions and explanations that some software systems can cause more harm than good and even with all good intentions, people should always able to audit and verify such systems for accuracy and correctness.

Does this book criticize programmers?
For unknown and strange to me reasons, this book does not criticizes programmers at all, it looks like it just a message to common population watch out for wild software!

It’s a pity, that this book does not give big attention to the programmers and decisions which they make during the day to day work.
As said earlier this book describes pretty hilarious examples of what software capable of when programmers didn’t validate it for correctness then following events start to happen:

  • People, which receive police tickets.
  • People, which can withdraw big amounts of money without double checking.
  • People, fight over false issued vouchers.
  • People, buy from online shops items which cost more than they actually afford, wrong prices.
  • Stock market exchange failed due to programmers mistake.

Whom can I recommend this book?
Managers definitely, software developers it’s a must read, people without computer science degree or even tech education!

Overall the book is fun reading and you will understand that software is complex thing , which must be asserted and verified , further more I totally agree that programmers must take fully responsibility for theirs work, then less damage to common people would be possible.
Don’t believe, well look at this:

If a voting machine doesn’t have software security measures, than it can cause voting fraud and the damage is done and programmers are will be seen as responsible for this!
People in USA already protesting against fraudulent counting processes and they will blame us software developers , who didn’t done the right job and didn’t make sure , that voting machine’s are 100% protected and can count votes accurately without any redundancy.