AFEW weeks ago, I remarked that we had become so used to the obscene amounts paid to and for football players that they had lost the capacity to shock.

There’s another area where vast sums of money are being wasted and misspent, without causing an outcry. What’s worse it is draining from the public purse.

This week, the Public Accounts Committee estimated that the abortive project to create computerised NHS patient records will eventually cost the taxpayer more than £10bn. The original loss had been estimated at £6bn but as these are sums well beyond the computation of mortals like you and me, I suppose the odd billion here or there matters little.

It’s the latest in a long line of costly IT failures – the child support agency, tax credits, immigration control. The list goes on and if last week’s predictions about Universal Credit are accurate, the worst is yet to come.

No doubt after this latest catastrophe, some civil servant or under-minister will be wheeled out and the old catchphrase of “Lessons have been learned” will be repeated.

We won’t believe them and deep down, I suspect they don’t believe themselves.

The question we have to ask is how it is that time and again people who we must assume are well-trained and well-intentioned and who we know are extremely well-paid can make such a mess of things.

A few common themes emerge. Lack of clarity in the original brief, complete lack of budget and project management skills and stubborn failure to admit error. They are at the root of every failure. Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result – is alive and well.

Perhaps there’s something else as well. It doesn’t let the culprits off the hook, but maybe it explains why they perform so badly.

Perhaps we are asking these people to do the impossible.

What all these failed systems have in common are their size and complexity. They are meant to be all-knowing and all-encompassing – a silver bullet solution.

“At the touch of a button” – how many times have we heard those words from salesmen, politicians, scientists, always followed by the assurance that this is the breakthrough which will bring us knowledge, wealth and leisure. How many times have we discovered it’s just not that easy?

Technology has enhanced all our lives and we should be grateful for that. But as long as it is designed and managed by fallible human beings, it will never provide the full solution to our problems.

I’ve read that the Wall Street crash was caused in part by the primitive – by our standards – communications systems of the time.

Politicians and financiers just couldn’t keep pace with events. But all the mobile phones in the world couldn’t prevent the banks from self-destructing again in our own lifetime.

Computers cannot save us from the consequences of our own actions.

Information technology underpins every aspect of modern life. It tells the supermarket bosses what we are buying at the tills, the doctor how we look after ourselves and the politicians what we think of them. No one questions the information these systems provide, even when results fly in the face of commonsense.

In the struggle of man versus machine, we’re a couple of goals down. What’s worse, the ref is a pre-programmed robot. But then again when wasn’t he?