Regulatory change
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Regulatory change is a good example of the sort of unanticipated change and complexity that is not solved by technology, but facilitated by it. For example, many jurisdictions in the have trade and transaction reporting regimes requiring automated reporting, the the millisecond, of all trades in the market and a range of second order metadata about them.
Conceptually this material, which must be submitted in real time to centralised trade data repositories on pain of significant financial penalty for failure, provides a wealth of data that improves market transparency, aids liquidity, can provide early warnings of forthcoming disruption and might also indicate and prevent market abuse. The programme for implementing these trade reporting systems adds technology, personnel in change management, compliance, operations and technology (none of whom were hitherto required; because it is not as if there a programme of manual trade reporting: there was no transaction reporting, it creates equivalent roles within trade repositories and regulators, and for third-party businesses providing connectivity, reporting and application interfaces to facilitate this. This new subsystem of interoperating parts — presents its own risks of systemic failure, and no doubt adds to the risks of systemic failure elsewhere. There is no alpha-go playing machine can manage and administer this complexity unaided. Humans; lots of humans will always be needed. They may well use technology to help them oversee that system - indeed they may need a lot of interacting technology to do that — but each such application introduces more complexity via the same positive feedback loop, creating more risk, requiring more narratising specialists to diagnose and manage.