IT is early Sunday morning and I am in Terminal Four at Heathrow Airport (yet again). I have cleared check-in, navigated passport control and security, and just wandered into the business lounge. I have rescued a large cup of coffee and I am sitting down at a table prepared to use the phone to synchchronise with my email. There is a message flashing on the phone display: "Please Wait System Rebooting." I cannot believe it - we now have to reboot the phone? Has the world gone completely mad? Reboot my PC, hi-fi, camera, microwave oven, dish washer and so on, but please not the phone!

In a world fuelled by accelerating technologies, I find myself rebooting more and more devices. It is interesting that rebooting my laptop and desktop machines seems to be becoming much less of an occurrence while almost everything else seems to be on the increase. Are we really going to have to go through a 10-year cycle of software upgrades to get our cameras, white and brown goods to settle down and become reliable? I do hope not.

The next big reboot deal that I dread is going to be my car. There are already top-end brands that flash a warning on the dash and then give you a few minutes to pull over before they immobilise the engine. While I mostly applaud the design philosophy which says that we should prevent people driving defective vehicles, or indeed prevent them damaging expensive parts, I do worry about the odd software bug here and there. I do not relish the thought of climbing into my car on a cold, rainy winter evening, in some remote or insecure location, for it to say "no" when I turn the key.

I can cope (just about) with the hi-fi and navigation aids saying "no" and needing a reboot, but please, not the engine. It is now futile to lift the hood on most modern cars as it is all unrecognisable as an internal combustion or diesel engine, and a computer is required for the most elementary diagnosis. So designers, please give me a qualified "no". Please tell me what to do. How do I fix the problem and get rolling? But do not leave me stranded because the screen washer bottle needs a top up.

As a species, we are conditioned to soft failures by our analogue-dominated history. Our machines used to die slowly in the past. They have tended to break down and ultimately fail slowly, and we have therefore been able to prepare for the consequences of a system failure. In a digital world, everything tends to die and fail abruptly with little or no warning. Digital death is near instantaneous by definition, and we should be designing in contingency technologies and decisions.

Automatic system reload and reboot, real-time performance, diagnosis and failure projections are just a few of the techniques employed in industrial and military systems that need to find their way into our vehicles.

On many occasions, it is possible to predict failure in digital systems if we take the trouble to collect the available data and perform the appropriate analysis. This is the equivalent of the human eye and ear spotting the changes in engine sounds and smoke discharges. A washing machine or wheel bearing on a car sound to be in trouble long before they fail, but there is no analogue for a hard drive failure, chip overheating or software bug. There sure needs to be one...