Fat Finger?

On May 6th, tech, combined with a possible Fat Finger, caused Wall Street to drop, for a short time, nearly 1000 points. The interesting part of this story lies with the fact the powers at be don't know how it happened.

"But, maddeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.

The initial focus of the investigations appeared to center on the way a growing number of high-speed trading networks interact with one another and with venerable exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange. Most investors are unaware that these competing systems have fractured the traditional marketplace and have displaced exchanges like the Big Board as the dominant force in stock trading."

When complexity reaches a certain level vis a vis digital systems, predicting what the system will do in certain instances becomes mysterious. When applied to weapons, lack of predictability can become deadly. 

"We’re not used to thinking of them this way.  But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger.  Most of the time.  Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own.  The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday."

SA National Defence Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known…

Deus ex Machina doesn't live here anymore...