My understanding of the article is that complex systems don't collapse faster, they simply need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that
But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an additional thousand years and did not fail after all.
Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the process is still going on.
So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster, but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without disappearing from history.
They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive even if their original form does not.
A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate it.
The best example of a complex system is the human body. It's useful to juxtapose such a complex system to a "complicated machine" such as a car as far as you they breakdown (i.e. collapse).
A single part failure can easily cause a car to become completely undrivable, whereas a surprisingly amount can go wrong with human body and it works more or less the same.
Not enough fuel and a car stops. It's completely binary, either you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human there is an incredible range of failure modes for not having enough fuel. Humans can survive an absurdly long time when they are 'empty' of food.
However once that human body does fail, it's over. Additionally all parts of it collapse together.
A car is more or less the sum of it's parts. You can take each individual part and take it off and reuse it, like wise each failing impacts primarily it self. The engine can go find with a flat tire, you can use the headlights on car with no gas and no wheels until the batteries fall out. When an essential component for driving the car fails, all of the other components are still useful. This also means that any piece that is necessarily for the car to drive causes complete failure for the system when it fails. But it also means you can restore the system trivially by repairing a single part.
The human body is more than the sum of it's parts. You can't trivially remove or replace parts. The upside is it is wildly resistant to failure. You can lose an eye and still see, you can lose huge parts of the brain and still function, you can damage a leg running a marathon and still find a way to finish rather quickly, the entire system can be under attack by an invader and automatically defend it self.
But there are limit and when they are cross the entire system fails completely and irreversibly. And in this sense they do collapse faster because once that limit is crossed the system rapidly starts to fail and can never be restored.
> Not enough fuel and a car stops. It's completely binary, either you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human there is an incredible range of failure modes for not having enough fuel. Humans can survive an absurdly long time when they are 'empty' of food.
You're highly selective. Let's switch things around a bit:
Not enough oxygen and a human stops. It's completely binary. But remove the oil from a car, and it can survive an absurdly long time.
More seriously, you can in sequence replace all parts of a car and it still functions as the original one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), but you can't do that with a human (even if cells do that in a way). This means you can have a car last 1000 years, but not a biological human.
My point was that complexity is not a single face phenomenon and can't account alone for risk of failure.
I believe we should look at why complexity is there and what purpose it serves.
Human body is a complex machine, but the fact that failure can bring it down to the extreme is because human body is fragile and once single organs start failing things cascades to the point of no return very quickly.
We are in fact not build for extreme resiliency, but for extreme adaptability (not even the most extreme nature created)
A simple system most of the times is built with simplicity in mind (sorry for the tautology) and sometimes because of simplicity is more efficient.
It can also happen to more complex systems, like for example our body which is very energy efficient at the expenses of resiliency. Klingons OTOH have two livers, an eight-chambered heart, and two stomachs. They are bigger, consume more energy and need to eat (and drink) a lot more. Redundancy adds complexity, but have its purpose.
Klingons do not exists obviously, but nuclear factories are another example of complexity serving safety, not more efficient operations.
Simpler systems usually exhibit single point of failures, like for example now with the war our very complex supply chain can shield us better from the consequences than countries that don't have them or can't afford them.
Historically they died sooner and we haven't records of their sudden fall, because they never reached the point were it mattered enough.
So complexity - I would call it complex redundancy -, which is very costly, depends a lot on the ability of gathering the resources.
Going back to the Romans, at one point they stopped making new steel and warships because the huge amount of wood necessary was not sustainable and Europe witnessed the first massive deforestation of its history.
So, before collapsing, they had to add another layer: recycling. Which can be simpler as a process but also requires a longer chain of supply.
Add to that the will of their enemies to conquer them, the lost knowledge on how to reboot failing systems because they were so old that people took them for granted and things can go south pretty rapidly, but that's not an inherent property of complexity, but of fragility.
The Universe is immensely complex, but I believe it's still going strong after 13 billions years from its birth.
There are a ton of systems built into living organisms that handle regulation and repair. These systems make us incredibly robust to many different types of insult. We don't build our systems like that, unfortunately humans are incredibly stupid and short sighted so we need to work harder to build robust systems. That's on top of the fact that nature has had such an incredibly long time to build these regulatory and repair systems
Yeah, the author sort-of deforms actual historical data to his own needs.
The Roman empire in the West was rather slow to collapse, even the fact that it survived the crisis of the third century [0] speaks more to its resilience than fragility. As late as 460, Western Roman commanders were able to subdue hostile barbarians and reattach their territories to the Empire proper [1].
The Roman empire in the East, as you notice, survived for another thousand years.
If the author wanted an example of an empire that collapsed really fast, it would be the USSR. That was indeed rather fast. In 1985, Moscow controlled not just the USSR itself, but several important European satellite states east of the Elbe, plus it held a lot of sway in the developing world. Six years later, the empire was gone. Not even Western Kremlinologists expected such a fast unraveling of the Soviet system.
Easy to explain. The USSR was a simplex system, the Roman empire a complex system.
he mostly explained large vs small systems, and didn't really qualify complex systems, until the very end.
a better explanation would be military vs democratic systems, the military being the simplex one, with straight hierarchies. the democracy with various complex interlinks, feedback loops and control mechanisms. Military is like a company, need to grow fast, and dies fast. commands need to spread fast.
I am not a history expert but it is interesting to hear that re: Rome, given the author's background
> Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017), Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021).
Intuitively it makes sense to me that more complex systems collapse faster because potentially they have more points and modes of failure.
For instance, due to advances in technology, many aspects of our current modern global society depend on the availability of Cobalt as a component in battery tech. This is a relatively rare element, with concentrated extraction.
Lots of things in modern society depend on having small, cheap, powerful batteries. Lots of systems are built upon systems which have that dependency. This creates a single point of failure which can have reverberating effects throughout the whole system.
I suppose the more complex and interconnected a system is, the more likely it is that you have many of these weak points floating around.
Complex systems indeed have a lot of failure modes, but what you'll find in any complex system which has survived any appreciable amount of time is that it'll be very tolerant of them: one maxim of system design is a complex system will always be operating in at least one failure mode: even more complex systems will usually have multiple going on at once. Systems can and do deal with this without complete collapse all the time: complete collapse usually happens only after enough failures build up over time such that it cannot compensate.
That said, this doesn't stop someone from designing a complex system which cannot tolerate failure: it's just it'll tend to fall apart as soon as they start to put it together (and they'll either learn quickly how to make it tolerate failure or it'll never get off the ground), it won't generally run fine for a long time and then implode suddenly.
yes and no. complex systems are not designed to be complex from the start. they are in fact successful simple systems that have evolved. Any complex system that is around for a while will have build in redundancy and, as a matter of fact, will run in degraded mode.
So I don't buy into the complex system collapse faster idea. I would say that if you were to look at a simple system and and a [working] complex system the simple system is going to collapse faster in case of a failure, while you may not notice failures as a complex system works around them). What the author here observes is the catastrophic collapse in the late stage of the system where something leads to the almost simultaneous collapse of multiple subsystems.
You can have a complicated system that spends its complexity "budget" on redundancy and/or protection mechanisms. This means that when A fails, B keeps things working, and when B fails, C does. And so the system just keeps going, with B failed, and F, and K, and Q and X and Z. And maybe nobody (or very few people) notice that there's all these failing subsystems adding up.
And then A fails, but hey, it's still running great!
And then C fails. And the system collapses, because A, B, and C all failed. And everybody thinks that it collapsed quickly, because nobody thinks of the collapse as starting when B failed.
TL;DR: A complex redundant system can run for a long time in a partially-failed state. If you measure only from the start of full failure, you can miss how long the collapse took.
It seems to me like this relates to how much emphasis there is on competition monopolizing the entire market and eliminating less efficient solutions. In the 1980s it seemed like every quirky solution would kind of survive, maybe being too bulky and too expensive (to fabricate) but not licensing X, Y or Z for an exorbitant price.. That greatly added complexity but meant redundancies.
In the current form, I feel like the highest efficiency solution maker (or maybe the one in second place) is usually trying to do extremely low licensing with the idea of winning the whole market. That's great in terms of efficiency and actually lowers complexity but means monoculture with exactly identical dependencies.
>need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that
I think this is a very good judgement.
It's a lot easier to deplete resources than to allow them to retain their value, or with even more difficulty achieve growth..
Sometimes things really fly off the shelf (viral) but mostly it takes a lot of work with a focused mindset for growth to be initiated to begin with and continue to take place for any length of time.
For a large multi-generational system like that the tremendous strength required to get it flying and keep it going will often have to result in some remarkable upward momentum.
The initiative required can sometimes be lost over one or more generations and the average person may not notice as the upward momentum alone prevents things from faltering immediately.
Until it's too late because the collective talent's focus needed to be retarding collapse as soon as the elusive initiative was lost, but that event did not register against the macro upward momentum still remaining.
So the whole thing comes crashing down while presided over by those who seemed OK at stewarding upward trends, while they were actually not capable of continuing the mindset or making equivalent contributions over one or more generations, and completely out of their element when downward pressure arises that would otherwise be overcome.
Agreed. When I saw Pisa Cathedral from 11th century in person it made me think ... There was no dramatic collapse in 5th century. Yes, a lot of upheaval, but I guess a lot of engineering knowledge from the Roman Empire period was preserved which in turn means that complex society in Italy remained quite sophisticated through the so called "dark ages".
We still don't know what actually happened, but the scholars studying it are discovering piece by piece that it was a "perfect storm" and no single event can be assumed as the root cause of the collapse.
The most interesting part of it, for me, is that it was a cascade failure caused by "globalization" of the times.
Maybe if we really understand what happened it can help us prevent a collapse of our current society (assuming it's not already too late)
Wow, this takes me back to 8th grade science fair in probably 1982 or 1983. I was casting about for a science project, and came across an article in Creative Computing magazine about this model, and the Limits of Growth and the Club of Rome, and I was like, "yeah, I'll make a population simulation on my Ti/994a in Extended BASIC and that'll be my science project." And so I did. I remember my model predicted population to fluctuate in a kind of sine wave pattern with some major crash in the early 2000's. I remember explaining the concept of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to the judges, and suspecting that my program was suffering a bit from GIGO. And I won in my category and went on to the state level science fair in Jackson, Mississippi, where I did win some scholarship from the Army (well, I'm not built for the army) but got beat out (justifiably) by this kid who had built a TRS-80 controlled robot. I remember being very impressed by his robot, of course, but maybe even moreso by the fact that all the silver finish was worn off his keyboard from where he'd been typing so much. It was also on that trip, during a visit to the university that I saw WordStar for the first time, and I was impressed by the automatic line breaking moving words to the next line, and I also saw some implementation of Lunar Lander on a vector graphics display for the first time.
I confess I haven't read the article yet but it gave me the feeling of being related to limits to growth.
It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the 1970s.
At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.
Queue theory suggests the more nodes you add to handle your queue then the longer your queue can survive (facing rising traffic) but the faster it will collapse when it finally runs out of capacity. Zach Tellman went over this in one of his talks and he had a nice graphic to demonstrate what this looks like:
Attempted to find critical counter points to the “seneca curve” — but was unable to find any via Google, Wikipedia, etc.
As is, worth noting that human’s analysis of complex systems is very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speaking humanity’s cognitive capacity, observations of universe large, small, over time, etc — are extremely finite.
While it’s possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the seneca curve, the core issues I take are that:
— most man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve, though in my opinion, so do most man made systems, not just complex ones.
— many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays and is very resilient to failures within its system.
Guess not having read the original research, to me the seneca curve feels like both literal & semantic cherry picking.
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As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would they really see any meaningful use to these labels in understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.
Isn’t Rome itself a counter example? It peaked in expansion and size in 117AD but didn’t really collapse until hundreds of years later (or a thousand of you consider Constantinople through Istanbul).
My recent example is Novell Networks that peaked in like 1995 but didn’t die until 2014. It took almost two decades to actually collapse.
You have noticed the problem with humans. They don't like modeling decay. So decay is simply ignored and assumed away. Meanwhile biological systems model decay. There is no obsession with growing forever. People's height is limited by nutrition and genetics, nothing else really.
If humans actively modelled decay in their society, their civilizations would last as long as ancient Egypt.
Ancient Egypt was conquered by Romans aka outside forces. Meanwhile the Roman empire collapsed from within.
> Perhaps the first person who reasoned in scientific terms about how to avoid collapses was the American scientist Jay Forrester (1918-2016). He was one of the main developers of the field known today as “system science.” To him we owe the idea that when people try to avoid collapse, they usually take actions that worsen the situation. Forrester described this tendency as “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.”
This is an interesting insight but I wonder if it is sort of an observational artifact. A complex social system that has developed formidable power, like the Roman Empire, probably has the ability to pull itself out of most tailspins if its superior resources are directed in a retrospectively-optimal way. So whenever you see a collapse of such a formidably powerful system, you'll see ways in which it could have averted the collapse, and attribute its decline to not doing those things.
Retrospectively optimal control isn't possible in general, so this insight might not be as useful as it sounds.
That appears to be the point of the comparison, no? If you are operating a machine so complex and unpredictable you don't truly know how it works (a Roman Empire, in this case), you'll never know which way to pull the lever until you have already done so.
Just speculation, but I think complexity provides decisive advantages, at least initially, and that's why we see complex societies dominate. Human groups that can avert catastrophe by adding complexity will do so, and those who do not may be unknown to history.
If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.
The article seems to argue that the capacity to do optimal control was there but the gold standard resulted in hoarding of currency and therefore required deficit spending by the state which was driven by the state. At some point the government could no longer dig out more gold to paper over the deficiencies of a gold standard and was forced to adopt suboptimal control instead. There are common stories about soldiers simply switching over to those with money in the Roman empire.
I don't think it's just pulling the levers the wrong way. The problem is that the same attributes that made a system successful initially are the ones that bring it down. One example might be the ancient Maya: they had a king who was also the head of their religion (and an athlete, and a musician.. he was a big celebrity). That worked great for a while because it helped to bring people together to have a leader like that. Anyways the Maya were having issues with deforestation, and trade routes moving, and so forth. Now the king was supposed to be talking to the gods to avoid this sort of thing. If he was to say, "we need to go back to more sustainable agriculture, and deal intelligently with having less wealth for a while" his subjects would probably kill him. He's not supposed to tell them to make sacrifices, he's supposed to be perfect and he's supposed to arrange things with the gods so they don't have to make compromises. So he has to say "the gods are angry, they demand temples and sacrifice" and so the Maya went on a construction spree while also launching costly wars against their neighbors. This did not improve the situation.
Take a look at capitalism. It's predicated on competition in which the company that can expand the fastest, grow the fastest, wins and eats the other companies. And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else. It's great if you want development at maximum speed. But not so great if you grow so much you threaten the earth you live on. But, our whole society is structurally unable to do anything else than this. Faced with economic problems, the only answer our system can give is to double down, do more capitalism faster and more aggressively. The bigger the problems, the more we double down on what worked before. Not the best idea. But since power and wealth in our society comes from holding capital, and since holding capital only brings you that power and wealth if it can move and grow- that means to do anything else than double down would require all the people to hold power and wealth in our society to lose that power and wealth. They'll see any threat to their power as a more immediate problem than global warming, which is slow moving and will affect everyone else first before they suffer at all.
> And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else
Close the loopholes. Implement negative interest on cash. Break up monopolies. Tax land value. If there are no god like safe havens of capital that no actually productive investment can win against, the pressure to do the impossible will greatly diminish.
Netflix became popular around 2004-2005, but it took another 5 years after that for blockbuster to fail, and it was sudden.
A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular, but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless.
A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the sudden decline of Research and Motion.
In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.
At least in the case of Blockbuster, I'd say the lag can be accounted for by the fact Netflix got into streaming in 2007. Prior to that Netflix started eating Blockbuster's lunch, but the service really took off once they managed to mainstream streaming. This was helped, in no small part, by the rapid rise in broadband penetration of that same time period.
The key thing is the same as in the coronavirus pandemic, it's exponential growth - think of Facebook as the virus, Myspace as the immune system and word-of-mouth being the infection way.
The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take over.
a lot of times the trigger is usually some kind of massive payment that needs to be made, but then all of a sudden whatever was enabling these payments to happen before is no longer happening and the company goes into default.
Everyone seems to be focusing on the crazy assertion that the Roman Empire collapsed quickly. But what stood out to me was citing Blockbuster as a complex system. They didn't die because an interconnected web of dependencies started to rot, they died because their entire reason for existing disappeared.
It's an interesting topic but the examples included are really weak.
> they died because their entire reason for existing disappeared.
That's only true if you characterize Blockbusters reason to exist as "distributing videotapes/dvd via physical stores" rather than just "distributing media".
Netflix also began in the physical media space but was able to pivot to streaming, helped along by their pre-existing remote business model.
Blockbuster tried to get in on the streaming game but it was a behemoth that couldn't swiftly disentangle itself from its old business model, helped along by several bad bets. So, it limped along for years past it being needed until it disappeared practically overnight.
You might think that this outcome was inevitable but that just means you've already taken it as a given that hulking, complex enterprises can't shift their main operating principles on a dime given a massive change in conditions.
Very true! I'd be curious to learn why they failed to make the shift to digital. I imagine having to support hundreds of storefronts was a huge distraction.
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But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an additional thousand years and did not fail after all.
Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the process is still going on.
So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster, but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without disappearing from history.
They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive even if their original form does not.
A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate it.
A single part failure can easily cause a car to become completely undrivable, whereas a surprisingly amount can go wrong with human body and it works more or less the same.
Not enough fuel and a car stops. It's completely binary, either you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human there is an incredible range of failure modes for not having enough fuel. Humans can survive an absurdly long time when they are 'empty' of food.
However once that human body does fail, it's over. Additionally all parts of it collapse together.
A car is more or less the sum of it's parts. You can take each individual part and take it off and reuse it, like wise each failing impacts primarily it self. The engine can go find with a flat tire, you can use the headlights on car with no gas and no wheels until the batteries fall out. When an essential component for driving the car fails, all of the other components are still useful. This also means that any piece that is necessarily for the car to drive causes complete failure for the system when it fails. But it also means you can restore the system trivially by repairing a single part.
The human body is more than the sum of it's parts. You can't trivially remove or replace parts. The upside is it is wildly resistant to failure. You can lose an eye and still see, you can lose huge parts of the brain and still function, you can damage a leg running a marathon and still find a way to finish rather quickly, the entire system can be under attack by an invader and automatically defend it self.
But there are limit and when they are cross the entire system fails completely and irreversibly. And in this sense they do collapse faster because once that limit is crossed the system rapidly starts to fail and can never be restored.
You're highly selective. Let's switch things around a bit:
Not enough oxygen and a human stops. It's completely binary. But remove the oil from a car, and it can survive an absurdly long time.
More seriously, you can in sequence replace all parts of a car and it still functions as the original one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), but you can't do that with a human (even if cells do that in a way). This means you can have a car last 1000 years, but not a biological human.
My point was that complexity is not a single face phenomenon and can't account alone for risk of failure.
I believe we should look at why complexity is there and what purpose it serves.
Human body is a complex machine, but the fact that failure can bring it down to the extreme is because human body is fragile and once single organs start failing things cascades to the point of no return very quickly.
We are in fact not build for extreme resiliency, but for extreme adaptability (not even the most extreme nature created)
A simple system most of the times is built with simplicity in mind (sorry for the tautology) and sometimes because of simplicity is more efficient.
It can also happen to more complex systems, like for example our body which is very energy efficient at the expenses of resiliency. Klingons OTOH have two livers, an eight-chambered heart, and two stomachs. They are bigger, consume more energy and need to eat (and drink) a lot more. Redundancy adds complexity, but have its purpose.
Klingons do not exists obviously, but nuclear factories are another example of complexity serving safety, not more efficient operations.
Simpler systems usually exhibit single point of failures, like for example now with the war our very complex supply chain can shield us better from the consequences than countries that don't have them or can't afford them.
Historically they died sooner and we haven't records of their sudden fall, because they never reached the point were it mattered enough.
So complexity - I would call it complex redundancy -, which is very costly, depends a lot on the ability of gathering the resources.
Going back to the Romans, at one point they stopped making new steel and warships because the huge amount of wood necessary was not sustainable and Europe witnessed the first massive deforestation of its history.
So, before collapsing, they had to add another layer: recycling. Which can be simpler as a process but also requires a longer chain of supply.
Add to that the will of their enemies to conquer them, the lost knowledge on how to reboot failing systems because they were so old that people took them for granted and things can go south pretty rapidly, but that's not an inherent property of complexity, but of fragility.
The Universe is immensely complex, but I believe it's still going strong after 13 billions years from its birth.
The Roman empire in the West was rather slow to collapse, even the fact that it survived the crisis of the third century [0] speaks more to its resilience than fragility. As late as 460, Western Roman commanders were able to subdue hostile barbarians and reattach their territories to the Empire proper [1].
The Roman empire in the East, as you notice, survived for another thousand years.
If the author wanted an example of an empire that collapsed really fast, it would be the USSR. That was indeed rather fast. In 1985, Moscow controlled not just the USSR itself, but several important European satellite states east of the Elbe, plus it held a lot of sway in the developing world. Six years later, the empire was gone. Not even Western Kremlinologists expected such a fast unraveling of the Soviet system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorian
he mostly explained large vs small systems, and didn't really qualify complex systems, until the very end.
a better explanation would be military vs democratic systems, the military being the simplex one, with straight hierarchies. the democracy with various complex interlinks, feedback loops and control mechanisms. Military is like a company, need to grow fast, and dies fast. commands need to spread fast.
See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121178/ev...
> Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017), Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021).
For instance, due to advances in technology, many aspects of our current modern global society depend on the availability of Cobalt as a component in battery tech. This is a relatively rare element, with concentrated extraction.
Lots of things in modern society depend on having small, cheap, powerful batteries. Lots of systems are built upon systems which have that dependency. This creates a single point of failure which can have reverberating effects throughout the whole system.
I suppose the more complex and interconnected a system is, the more likely it is that you have many of these weak points floating around.
That said, this doesn't stop someone from designing a complex system which cannot tolerate failure: it's just it'll tend to fall apart as soon as they start to put it together (and they'll either learn quickly how to make it tolerate failure or it'll never get off the ground), it won't generally run fine for a long time and then implode suddenly.
So I don't buy into the complex system collapse faster idea. I would say that if you were to look at a simple system and and a [working] complex system the simple system is going to collapse faster in case of a failure, while you may not notice failures as a complex system works around them). What the author here observes is the catastrophic collapse in the late stage of the system where something leads to the almost simultaneous collapse of multiple subsystems.
Here is one of my favourite writings that ties complex systems with failure: https://how.complexsystems.fail/
And then A fails, but hey, it's still running great!
And then C fails. And the system collapses, because A, B, and C all failed. And everybody thinks that it collapsed quickly, because nobody thinks of the collapse as starting when B failed.
TL;DR: A complex redundant system can run for a long time in a partially-failed state. If you measure only from the start of full failure, you can miss how long the collapse took.
In the current form, I feel like the highest efficiency solution maker (or maybe the one in second place) is usually trying to do extremely low licensing with the idea of winning the whole market. That's great in terms of efficiency and actually lowers complexity but means monoculture with exactly identical dependencies.
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For me, the word “complex” complicates the assertion without adding much value.
I prefer, “Systems fail faster as the number of modes and points of failure increase.”
I think this is a very good judgement.
It's a lot easier to deplete resources than to allow them to retain their value, or with even more difficulty achieve growth..
Sometimes things really fly off the shelf (viral) but mostly it takes a lot of work with a focused mindset for growth to be initiated to begin with and continue to take place for any length of time.
For a large multi-generational system like that the tremendous strength required to get it flying and keep it going will often have to result in some remarkable upward momentum.
The initiative required can sometimes be lost over one or more generations and the average person may not notice as the upward momentum alone prevents things from faltering immediately.
Until it's too late because the collective talent's focus needed to be retarding collapse as soon as the elusive initiative was lost, but that event did not register against the macro upward momentum still remaining.
So the whole thing comes crashing down while presided over by those who seemed OK at stewarding upward trends, while they were actually not capable of continuing the mindset or making equivalent contributions over one or more generations, and completely out of their element when downward pressure arises that would otherwise be overcome.
We still don't know what actually happened, but the scholars studying it are discovering piece by piece that it was a "perfect storm" and no single event can be assumed as the root cause of the collapse.
The most interesting part of it, for me, is that it was a cascade failure caused by "globalization" of the times.
Maybe if we really understand what happened it can help us prevent a collapse of our current society (assuming it's not already too late)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the 1970s.
At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0
I suppose any complex system has dynamics like that, more capacity to absorb load, but then a faster collapse when capacity is surpassed.
Hemmingway's Laws Of Motion applies:
”How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. ”Gradually and then suddenly.”
Put a bit differently by the economist Rudiger Dornbusch:
”The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”
lifted from:
https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-la...
As is, worth noting that human’s analysis of complex systems is very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speaking humanity’s cognitive capacity, observations of universe large, small, over time, etc — are extremely finite.
While it’s possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the seneca curve, the core issues I take are that:
— most man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve, though in my opinion, so do most man made systems, not just complex ones.
— many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays and is very resilient to failures within its system.
Guess not having read the original research, to me the seneca curve feels like both literal & semantic cherry picking.
________
As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would they really see any meaningful use to these labels in understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.
My recent example is Novell Networks that peaked in like 1995 but didn’t die until 2014. It took almost two decades to actually collapse.
If humans actively modelled decay in their society, their civilizations would last as long as ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was conquered by Romans aka outside forces. Meanwhile the Roman empire collapsed from within.
This is an interesting insight but I wonder if it is sort of an observational artifact. A complex social system that has developed formidable power, like the Roman Empire, probably has the ability to pull itself out of most tailspins if its superior resources are directed in a retrospectively-optimal way. So whenever you see a collapse of such a formidably powerful system, you'll see ways in which it could have averted the collapse, and attribute its decline to not doing those things.
Retrospectively optimal control isn't possible in general, so this insight might not be as useful as it sounds.
If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.
Take a look at capitalism. It's predicated on competition in which the company that can expand the fastest, grow the fastest, wins and eats the other companies. And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else. It's great if you want development at maximum speed. But not so great if you grow so much you threaten the earth you live on. But, our whole society is structurally unable to do anything else than this. Faced with economic problems, the only answer our system can give is to double down, do more capitalism faster and more aggressively. The bigger the problems, the more we double down on what worked before. Not the best idea. But since power and wealth in our society comes from holding capital, and since holding capital only brings you that power and wealth if it can move and grow- that means to do anything else than double down would require all the people to hold power and wealth in our society to lose that power and wealth. They'll see any threat to their power as a more immediate problem than global warming, which is slow moving and will affect everyone else first before they suffer at all.
Close the loopholes. Implement negative interest on cash. Break up monopolies. Tax land value. If there are no god like safe havens of capital that no actually productive investment can win against, the pressure to do the impossible will greatly diminish.
A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular, but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless.
A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the sudden decline of Research and Motion.
In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall...
The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take over.
It's happening right now with Facebook/Instagram and Tik Tok.
If you want to read about the collapse of complex societies from an actual anthropologist, I recommend Joseph Tainter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collaps...
It's an interesting topic but the examples included are really weak.
That's only true if you characterize Blockbusters reason to exist as "distributing videotapes/dvd via physical stores" rather than just "distributing media".
Netflix also began in the physical media space but was able to pivot to streaming, helped along by their pre-existing remote business model.
Blockbuster tried to get in on the streaming game but it was a behemoth that couldn't swiftly disentangle itself from its old business model, helped along by several bad bets. So, it limped along for years past it being needed until it disappeared practically overnight.
You might think that this outcome was inevitable but that just means you've already taken it as a given that hulking, complex enterprises can't shift their main operating principles on a dime given a massive change in conditions.