Timothy Rollings
Reflections and notes on systems, life, engineering, and how they evolve.
Cheap complexity
Published on 2024-05-30
When some aspect of a complex system is cheap, more parts are produced. Eventually, you are left with emergent complexities too expensive to manage despite affordability.
The issue is that once the initially cheap aspects of a system are no longer affordable, linear improvements can have geometric costs. The system then must spend increasingly more to function.
When this happens, people start to complain and blame others for why things can't go on like it did when things were cheaper. Yet, the only thing to blame is assuming these conditions would never change despite wanting to produce more.