Broken airport kiosks spark essay: civilization is dying by a million cuts until superintelligence
joshwhiton · x · 2026-08-18
The author recounts a faulty self-serve kiosk at Reykjavik airport: it displayed German despite English being selected, printed four boarding passes but no bag tag, and neither security staff nor Lufthansa agents had the incentive or power to fix it. He argues this illustrates a broader point: modern civilization's complexity has outstripped our collective intelligence and will, nearly all human systems are broken, and such unowned bugs will keep wasting millions of passengers' time until superintelligence eventually fixes the mess.
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