Speakers
Speaker Session
The limited debate on how brittle our technological world is becoming needs to be addressed or we risk sleepwalking into catastrophe. This talk is based on a 1984 analysis of high-risk technologies by Charles Perrow of Yale. His thesis is that when systems become sufficiently complex and tightly coupled, failure will be unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable, and sadly, unavoidable. Blaming the operator is common, but Perrow’s conclusion is that failure is not unlucky or abnormal but inevitable based on design. The solution is not more risk mitigation features which add complexity but to return to less complex systems that are inherently robust, less efficient, and less vulnerable to failure and attack.
Moray Rumney received a BSc in EE from Heriot-Watt University in 1984. He joined Hewlett-Packard that year and remained with the company through the transition to Agilent Technologies in 1999 and Keysight Technologies in 2015. Moray joined ETSI in 1991 and 3GPP in 1999 where he participated in the development of cellular communications standards and conformance test methods. His recent work has focused on radiated test methods for mobile phones. He was editor and major contributor to Agilent’s book “LTE and the Evolution to 4G Wireless”. From 2018 to 2021 Moray represented Keysight at 3GPP RAN plenary who oversee the development of the 5G radio standards. His recent interests include expert witness work, engineering consulting services, and the safety debate around cellular technology including the evolution of test methods to validate that base stations and mobile phones comply with safety regulations.