If my magic label seems a little abstract, there’s one final concrete reason you should take notice of regarding the effects of accelerating technological innovation. As I’ve hinted at elsewhere in this book, increasing complexity is inherently more likely to fail. As systems have larger numbers of small interdependent parts, all it takes is for one or two small things to go wrong, and then cascade into a total system failure.
Charles Perrow is the seminal thinker in the field of accident research. He set out to understand why the accident at Three Mile Island happened, and he found that it was a consequence of the system’s immense complexity. In immensely intricate systems like this, with “tight coupling” of components, and “interactive complexity” Perrow argues that it become difficult or impossible to predict how the various components system will behave together and how failures will propagate. The result is small and unanticipated failures quickly escalate into major accidents. He realized that catastrophic failures were so inevitable that they should be seen as a ‘normal accident’.
Perrow’s conclusions were upheld in the investigations into subsequent disasters like Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger explosion. We also see it in the 2003 electrical grid failure which knocked out power to over 45 million people. The initial triggering event was a small but manageable software bug that prevented an alarm from occurring when certain lines were overloaded. Then a tree contacted one of these overloaded transmission lines in Ohio. Because of the interdependence between Ohio and other Eastern US grids, within seconds the local problem cascaded through the US’s most densely populated region. On that hot sticky day in just New York City, tens of thousands of people were suddenly stranded in elevators and dark subway tunnels, while many more hundreds of thousands of people had to walk to home or other shelter in the dark and gridlocked city. Full power was not restored there for 2 days, and other areas of the Northeast experienced even longer recovery. The incident strained phone networks, and lack of electricity caused Detroit to lose water pressure (residents had to boil water for 4 days) while Cleveland and New York saw sewage water spill into waterways.
No less dramatic were the consequences of the most recent covid pandemic, which showed us that among other things, the world is linked by and dependent on a very complex web an immensely entangled supply chain.
Perrow’s work hinges on situations when things inevitably go wrong in increasingly complex systems. But what happens when things go right?
Joseph Tainter is an anthropologist and historian who studied the collapse of civilizations. He found a common thread – increasing complexity comes at increasing cost, and eventually the cost of sustaining that complexity overwhelms a civilization. So even if things don’t break, the cost of continually operating the complex thing, and expanding and innovating on it, brings it to its’ own demise.
He uses the Roman Empire as a classic example. It’s vaunted road system, bureaucracy, and military organization reached throughout the world, providing order and some increases in the quality of life for ordinary Roman Citizens during the centuries of the Pax Romana. Due to this expansion, however, it faced various military, economic, and administrative difficulties. Rome invested heavily in maintaining its’ vast territorial holdings and supporting the complex apparatus of governance and military infrastructure.
Eventually the returns on these investments began to diminish, and Rome became fragile, and collapsed. Civilizations can counter this problem for a short term, by conquering neighboring people, and using that wealth, accrued over decades or centuries, to fuel Rome’ operating costs for a few years, but this, too, is a dead-end road, as the conquering itself begets more complexity, and even smaller marginal returns.
To bring Tainter back to our own modern individual experience, think back 2 pages, when I mentioned the toll that technology demands on us to acquire, install, and effectively maintain. That toll is but one of the many technologically driven factors that contributes to the average American finding themselves fat, broke, alienated, depressed, busy, stressed out, unhappy, and increasingly in some circles – angry. That is not progress.
This is why the two tech camps talk past each other. Yes, you may be way better off in some ways than your great grandparents. After all, you have miraculous technologies like clean indoor running water, flushing toilets and a Roomba. But if you feel worse off, it doesn’t matter.
And this but a micro scale representation of the dynamics that Perrow warns of, and Tainter sees playing out historically at the scale of civilizations. This is the state of the water in which we find ourselves swimming.