Today, computers and the Information Technology rule huge amount of our daily lives yet they are wide open to the most ridiculous misdemeanours, mostly with no consequence to the culprits. How did it come to this? If unckecked, often that is, nearly anybody can claim to be an IT expert and cause untold damages to organisations and their clients and customers? The basic safeguards are either not in place or they are desperately inadequate. Why is it so? Why didn’t the automobile and aviation (who’ve also known huge growth in relatively short timeframes) know similar “laisser-faire”?
It’s a good thing that we can learn from our forefathers’ legacies. It’s good that we can experience the world in our own way – some will rightly dispute the term “our forefathers”. This way we can enrich ourselves and our communities, discover new things (“new” in this context only applies to the discoverer and some part of his/her community). Nearly every discipline in our body of knowledge and society have known a select group of influential contributors, some of these have single-handedly driven things forward. These pioneers’ and geniuses’ acts and thoughts in some cases took the entire mankind to new places, always with the duality of good/bad aspects and consequences.
However.
People have quickly learned that some experiments and explorations are best kept within bounds. If nothing else we realised that we could get hurt or others (we care about) could also get hurt. Every time we reached such epiphany we came up with elaborate principles, ways of behaving and means of communicating for preserving self- and preserving loved-ones. Examples abound, we have rules and regulations to deal with all aspects of society, we have codes of conduct, we have traffic rules, we have laws, we have regulatory bodies, and so on and so forth. This can be collectively called “civilisation”, for the lack of a better term. Thank goodness we can now walk up and down city streets, buy food, enter and exit buildings, get on planes, trains, cars, go places, all of this with reasonable assurance that we will get through the experience unharmed and we can repeat the feat again and again.