Systems March of Death: Increased Coordination, Increased Vulnerability, Viral Demise

Systems are motivated to improve their coordination. It creates efficiency and enhanced convenience, it creates a sense of greatness and strength. It also increases vulnerability. Eventually it is impossible to limit a disfunction to one segment: everything affects everytying. The emerging complexity harbors hidden weaknesses: death spiral scenarios. These scenarios trace themselves to innocent-looking initiating action. The system management may be aware of some such deadly innocent initiators, but eventually the complexity rises to the point that some of these collapse-leading innocent looking initiators are not pre-identified by the system management. These initiators act like hidden mines, they are being stepped upon (sooner or later) and then the death spiral is triggered until a complete collapse.

An alternative scenario is the emergence of a small disgruntled group that identifies such a death initiator and brings it about as a desperate suicide act of destruction.

Even awareness of this march of death is not strong enough to prevent the preceding march towards increased coordination and increased vulnerability. Our only hope is to use this awareness to slow the process down, to cool it. We need to learn to inject randomness into the system, we need to build in rapid disengagement mechanism to cut off a viral demise, and we need to plan for deep recovery from collapsed parts of the system.

This march of death is identified in complete abstraction, it applies to any system of any sort. Our main worry of course is humanity at large. The eight billion of us on this earth, we are getting more and more coordinated, driven by efficiency and convenience, and we are getting more and more vulnerable. both to e a chance mistake, and to a malicious viral unleash. We better use good countermeasures to stay alive a bit longer.