First Take: Computers show their flaws at United, NYSE

SAN FRANCISCO — Computers have always carried the promise of vastly simplifying our lives while harboring the potential to send the orderly world they facilitate into chaos.

While typically the subject of Hollywood films, technology's darker side was on stark display Wednesday as computer glitches sabotaged the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and The Wall Street Journal.

Initially, it's not clear if the crashes were related to coordinated cyber attacks, but hacking group Anonymous ominously tweeted yesterday: "Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street ... we can only hope." But the source of the problem wouldn't seem to matter when the result is the same crippling inoperability.

Wednesday's outages raise a simple if familiar question: With an economy increasingly anchored to sharing data at lightning speed, are we hurtling headlong into a world where our most sensitive information is inherently at risk of being manipulated, stolen and expunged?

We've already seen the downside with cyber-attacks on brand-name companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot and Target, the last of these resulting in 40 million card accounts being exposed to the digital underworld. Yet despite these almost daily data breeches, we continue to be lured by the utter convenience of our tech-based system. Withdrawal doesn't seem to be an option.

So whether or not this proves to be the work of criminals, it reinforces the simple reality that now we have two things to worry about: hackers and bugs.

But what's even more concerning than having our credit cards compromised by these digital systems is the fact that we are poised on the brink of relying on tech to power far more significant and potentially dangerous parts of our lives.

Just think about the bold advances in the past year alone in the fields of augmented and virtual reality and driverless cars. If your autonomous vehicle crashes, you won't immediately be asking if it was caused by a criminal or a faulty server. Increasingly, we could be not just in thrall of tech, but also at its mercy.

Looking to government for solutions may not bring much comfort, if you consider the handling of the Obamacare website or even last month's crash of the Consular Consolidated Database handling the nation's passport system. In fact, government has turned to Silicon Valley to help guide its technology policy, tapping Google's Megan Smith as the nation's chief technology officer.

The bottom line is if we're going to continue headlong into this brave new technology world, we need to get braver and smarter fast.

While tech companies such as Google and Facebook — and the countless start-ups that could soon become like those behemoths — are powered by the best and brightest minds, perhaps its time to find a way to funnel those geniuses away from building the next cool app and toward ensuring that this interconnected infrastructure that we've built remains dependable.

Today's outages appear to be benign (and for United, relatively brief). But it's a wake-up call we need to heed.