The Cost of Complexity

Thomas Frey is currently Google’s Top Rated Futurist Speaker.  He serves as the Senior Futurist and Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute. Read his article “The Complexity Disease”.

“As complexity of a system increases, the costs associated with it increase exponentially to the point where the costs approach infinity, and collapse is a certainty. …. It can be argued that every major civilization in history has fallen because of unsustainable levels of complexity. In major civilizations such as the Egyptian, Greek, or Roman empires, as well as in smaller civilizations like the Mayan Indians and Mesopotamia, each one reached a point where an ever increasing bureaucracy with an ever increasing number of rules simply overloaded the administrator’s ability to comply with them, and the systems collapsed. Modern technology has given us the ability to manage systems that are far more complex.  And following a similar curve to Moore’s Law, our ability to automate has kept up with our ability to complicate. However, the breaking point will not be the automated systems. Rather, the breaking point will be the human interface and the exacting toll that the income tax system has placed on people to comply…. In our government we have failed to create a checks-and-balance system to mitigate complexity.

We are on an irreversible path, and as complexity of a system increases, the costs associated with it increase exponentially to the point where the costs approach infinity, and collapse is a certainty. The level of complexity has now spiraled out of control. Income tax has gone beyond the pale of understandability and exists as nothing more than a confusing blur to the tax paying public. The complexity has reached a point of being irreversible, causing the system to unravel around the edges. ”

But remember, if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.

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