Complexity

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All other things being equal, a bummer. A violation of Occam’s razor; a source of confusion, a time-sink, a material contributor to catastrophic normal accidents; a waste — yet in a distributed network of autonomous bodies, a total inevitability. The more sophisticated the group of individuals, the greater the rate of complexificaiton.

See also

• Barnacles
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by the magnificent Charles Perrow.