BOAC, - level 4, I don’t think so.
I interpreted level 3 as including the deeper ‘bits and bytes’.
I abbreviated the quote “
Level 3 systems whose implications you cannot fathom”, which continues … “
With input from tablet computers, cameraphones and walls of dancing video, and with much of your memory outsourced to Google and your social relations to Face-book, you now embody the accelerating charge of the Five Horsemen of converging technology - nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology, and applied cognitive science – whose cumulative potency will transform the human-Earth system in ways that are impossible to predict.”
Re …. who 'supervises the supervisors', again the article implies that this is up to us, apart from deity, there is no one else. We, humans, have created this ‘mess’ and thus with the necessary
courageous realisation have to ‘self-police’ the situation.
A later quote explains this in part –
“
We have to become a lot smarter in moving ourselves and our institutions of learning and innovation, of political and economic decision-making, out of their Level I playrooms. This transition will require us to increase the diversity of world views involved in creating and assessing our technological activities. It asks us to create more richly imagined futures, seeded with more potential choices, so that we have improved opportunities to learn from and respond to the choices we are making.”
I am not sure what aviation might pick out of that, but IMHO, part of the realization must include ‘transition’, that the industry is changing; and ‘learning’, if not from the very rare level 3 accidents, then from everyday behavior – how humans successfully manage these complex technological systems, in complex operational environments, with normal human interaction.
Aviation, with modern aircraft, is a very safe form of transport.
… we have created a ‘mess’. Perhaps the following is an appropriate summary:-
A difference between a difficulty (level 1 & 2) and a mess (level 3) is that when the problem is a
difficulty, an individual claiming to have the solution is an asset, but when the problem is a
mess that individual is usually a large part of the problem!
Paraphrased from
Systems Failure, J Chapman.