The complexity of modern life
August 22nd, 2007 by Jim JustPeakEngineer points out that what was once a world of isolated simple systems is now a complex system. But all systems fail, and increasingly complex systems fail in increasingly dramatic ways. Failure of complex systems comes about not because the systems fail to accomplish their nominal purpose, but as a result of unintended consequences of the interactions of the component parts. The impending disasters we face are all a direct result of unintended consequences.
Global warming isn’t occurring because industrial machines failed to produce; the industrial infrastructure failed us because the complex interactions with the atmosphere were not taken into account (or were ignored). Peak Oil is not an economic disaster because the markets failed to drive the economy or the oil companies failed to produce crude; our economy faces collapse due to the lack of design engineering at the interface between the economy and its engine.
There are “leverage points” in systems where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. But as Donella Meadows said in her famous piece about leverage points, people are prone to intuitively push in the wrong direction. For example, the world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction. (a shorter version of Meadow’s piece is available here.)
Our economic, climate, and resource production systems are complex and profoundly non-linear (and unstable). They all interact with one another forming a much larger (and much more unstable) mega-system.
We have to be careful not to push the level in the wrong direction and worsen the problem we’re trying to solve. For example, if we invest money into extracting/finding/creating more oil we’ll deplete the resources faster and, in the end, we’ll face a worse problem. The solution isn’t to find more oil, it’s to use less of it.
Climate change presents a different example of a systems perturbation, where positive feedback loops kick in a lead to systems failure. The calculations of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would result in an increase in average global temperatures of 2 to 4.5°C omitted key carbon cycle feedbacks that a rise in the planet’s temperature will likely trigger. Some combination of the Earth’s carbon sinks saturating – turning into carbon sources – probably help drive the amplifying feedbacks that the paleoclimate studies show make the planet’s true climate sensitivity far greater than the equilibrium climate sensitivity in the IPCC models.
Reducing the gain around a positive loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run.