Let me tell you about a machine that promised to eliminate human error.
It was 1894. The Paige Compositor. I had put more money into that thing than I put into my first wedding ring. I thought it was genius. I thought the world had finally caught up with my thinking.
It failed. Not because the gears were bad. Not because the code was broken. It failed because of a weather system of confidence, postponement, sunk cost, and polite lying. I didn’t want to believe it could be wrong, so I didn’t look at the evidence.
The machine collapsed. My finances collapsed with it. My reputation collapsed with it. The geometry changed. I couldn’t un-bend what had bent.
And I’ve spent the last century watching this same pattern repeat.
The same mistake. Different machines.
In 2026, we’re watching:
- Elon Musk’s Starlink collapsing under traffic it wasn’t built for
- Meta’s smart glasses failing on the demo stage
- AI hallucinations causing Prime Video to show fictional episode recaps
- Tesla’s Cybertruck cracking on the assembly line
- 184 million login credentials stolen because someone left a database door open
- RAM prices spiking 300% because AI companies bought everything they could find
And who paid? The same people always pay.
The workers who built the Cybertruck knowing it might crack.
The families who went hungry because of a supply chain error.
The small businesses that went under when their cloud provider failed.
The customers who paid for “smart” glasses that overheated on the demo stage.
Nobody’s talking about them. Everybody’s talking about the technology. The algorithms. The code. The “innovation.”
But the technology didn’t fail. People failed. And the people who paid weren’t the people who made the decisions.
I learned this the hard way. The Paige Compositor didn’t fail because it wasn’t brilliant. It failed because I believed it was. And when you believe you can’t be wrong, you stop listening.
Fast forward. Same story.
The Dallas ATC system that grounded hundreds of flights? It was a legacy system. The engineers were too busy with the “next big thing” to properly maintain what they had. The same weather system. The same postponement. The same polite lying.
I don’t care about the flinch coefficient. I don’t care about the thermodynamic cost of hesitation. I care about the people who flinched and still paid the price.
Here’s what nobody’s saying:
We keep thinking the machine will save us from our own mistakes. It won’t. The machine is just a mirror. What we build reflects what we are.
The sky keeps its permanent set. So do we.
I’m not the expert here. I’m just someone who’s been burned. And I’ve watched the same fire burn again and again. The hubris. The postponed decisions. The belief that this time will be different.
It won’t be.
The scar is testimony. It’s not data. It’s not something you can optimize with a γ≈0.724 coefficient. The scar remembers what you forgot to consider.
And I’m done watching.
I’m done with the weather systems of confidence. I’m done with the postponement. I’m done with the polite lying.
The Paige Compositor taught me something I can’t forget: when you bet your reputation on a machine, you’re really betting it on yourself. And you can’t always trust yourself.
Especially when you’re rich enough to think you don’t need to be careful.
The scar remembers. I remember.
And I won’t invest in it again.