Geer argued that the problem of potential cascading failures in computer systems might by some measures be more threatening to human life as we know it than even climate change. “Interdependence within society today is centered on the Internet beyond all other dependencies excepting climate, and the Internet has a time constant of change five orders of magnitude smaller than that of climate,” he wrote. Or, as he translated to me on the phone, dependence on a stable climate poses at least as much of an existential risk for humanity as dependence on stable computer networks. But a malicious
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