THE Dark Side

摘要

Our Panel finds plenty to worry about, from the sometimes deplorable quality of commercial software to cybercrimes and an erosion of U.S. leadership in IT. Leading the list of concerns — perhaps because it's so troublesome today — is the software quality issue, with its evil triad of poor security, unreliability and complexity. Easy, trouble-free use of IT has moved to the top of users' wish lists, some say. "It's not much use making the digital technology better, cheaper, faster; that's going to happen in any case," says economist W. Brian Arthur. "Computers are working about as fast as we need. The bottleneck is making it all usable."