Overcomplicated, literature review

One of the first areas of research I conducted into futurology was reading and comprehending the findings and research of a contemporary futurist and scientist, Samuel Arbesman. His book Overcomplicated studies and examines our overcomplicated technological systems of past and the present in order to predict what the future will hold for us and our inventions.

I picked the most relevant chapters to read, which would aid my research into understanding science and today technological systems. 

Going form Machio Kakus quote in my earlier research, 

'If you want to understand the future you have to understand Physics'

Our technology is the fruits to our understanding and mastery of physics. In that same order I will work to understanding the physics behind our current technology and in turn this will aid the predictions of future technology to design for Childhoods End.

By no surprise Arbesman's entire book was relevant and helpful. However I'm not going to reiterate and analyze it all. Just the most important sections that communicate to the reader what our past present and future technology suffers from, but also has its hidden secrets and greatest strength. 

The book was best summarized by the Aerospace researcher Regina Peldszua in her article

A field guide to technology gone feral stating:

The fact that Arbesman uses the term “overcomplicated” in reference to such systems should invite us to listen carefully. He is not someone who didn’t read the manual. A trained computational biologist, Arbesman uses quantitative models to explore the chaos around us. And because the “entanglement” he diagnoses today is more akin to an evolving ecology than a carefully configured and managed machine, Arbesman encourages us to adopt the attitudes and methods of field biologists...

The warning implicit in Overcomplicated is clear: if you ignore the intricacies of intractable systems, refuse to engage with the anomalous underbelly of concealed electronic complexity, or fail to attribute due importance to minute but critical parts, then those ever-so-fleeting “edge cases” will sooner or later resurface as freakishly bizarre incidents, and catastrophes as inevitable as they are unanticipated.

Yes there is the element of fore-warning to our technological systems, which are detrimental due to the way we develop them, but also there inlays the boon we have inherently placed with those systems too.  

Unlike Peldszus, my perspective on Overcomplicated looks past his statement and sees the over arching positivity in these technological systems even when they have inevitable backfires. 

Through this review I will recap and explain how I came to this more positive conclusion with Arbesman findings.

In the second chapter, The origins of the Kluge, the dire flaw to our modern technology is introduced and explained.

Essentially this chapter explains the systemic character flaw we have built in our technology. 

Its uncontrollable complexity built in through no fault of our own, due to connecting it to our complex human culture itself. 

Quoting Arbesman, "Each of theses systems is an engineered technology, crafted by generations of experts for a specific function. One might assume that if these systems are being designed rationally, they should be logical, elegant and even simple; they'd be more predictable and easier to fix. 

Yet, despite our best efforts, our technology becomes ever more complex and complicated."

The chapter then explains how this complexity flaw develops over time with two forces; Accretion and interaction.

Accretion - The gradual growth and layering of technologies onto of one another, (the human aspect).

A good example is given in the chapter, of a major problem the Federal Aviation Administration had while fixing their Y2K bug for air traffic control before the new year switched over;

The IBM 3083- was particularly tricky to fix. Among the issues, according to the head of the union representing the FAA technicians: "There's only two folks at IBM who know the micro-code, and they're both retired."  Thats because the IBM 3083 was mainframe machine installed in the 1980's, with software dating from years earlier.  In other words, as of the late 1990s, the systems that were responsible for properly routing our aircraft were using computers with code that almost nobody was familiar with any longer.

To compound this problem all the air traffic control computer systems were built up through the accretion of technology, resulting in a complexity of entanglement. 

Arbesman argues,  its behavior (human technology) mimics the vagaries of the natural world more than it conforms to a mathematical model.

The accretion in our technology is inescapable and unable to be clean slated. We must abandon our need for governing principles and rules and accept the chaos.  This chaos creates excitement, conflict and problems but also inventiveness to our society and culture.  This model of complexity and chaos that gives rise to imagination and inventiveness sounds all to familiar, that is because it is one of the many key issues communicated by Authur C Clarke.

Interaction- connecting and making compatibility between two or more technologies to one another.

This force is explained in the following example;

The lawyer Philip K. Horawrd has examined the story of the Byonne Bridge, which crosses a channel between New York and New Jersey. This nearly hundred year old bridge is too low to allow modern container ships to pass beneath it in order to reach the port of Newark, a critical commercial hub. So what can be done? Among the proposed solutions to this problem was one that involved retrofitting, essentially raising the bridge to the necessary height. It was the cheapest solution and the one that won out, back in 2009. But construction did not commence for several years, because of a combination of accretion and interaction. The rules and regulations dictating the procedure for the bridge's renovations involved forty-seven permits from nineteen different government entities - everything from environmental impact statements to historical surveys. 

In this instance the force of interaction in technology between the new shipping system and the existing bridge infrastructure resulted in such a complexity that costed unmountable time. Howard discovers this time factor is critical and when a complex interaction delays replacement of decaying infrastructure it can be counterproductive to save lives.

This concept of interoperability is best summed up in this quote from Arbesman;  'whichever technological system we look at, whether it be a legal system, a piece of software, an appliance, a scientific mode, or whatever else that we have built, each is driven to be come more complex and more kluge-like because of exceptions and edge cases, alongside the twin forces of accretion and interaction.'

Lastly this chapter looks a edge cases - which are human variations and exceptions that have made technology complex aswell.  Arbesman gives a simple example by proposing to build a 365 day electronic calendar, seems simple enough but this is then revealed to be much harder task once we integrate all our human irregularities.  Such as leap years, times zones, day light saving routines and the Gregorian calendar switch,  makes this calendar now require several complex programs.  

On top of that cultures and societies have differing holidays such as Passover, now it needs a lunar calculation cycle.  All these edge cases result in the accumulation of an overcomplicated technology, which started off to be quite simple. 

Computer sciences and engineering have a term this over complication to a once simple tech, a kluge.

Arbesmans next chapter Losing the Bubble exploring these kluges breaking down and how even the experts who design them are at a loss as to there solutions.

Later in chapter five The Need for Biological Thinking the book explains how deal with this technopoly world we have surrounded ourselves in and how it takes a new form of thinking to comprehend the chaos.

Finally the book ends with the chapter Walking Humbly with Technology. 

Describing a future where we strive and struggle endlessly with our complex technology but we accept it. For to abolish it and take a perfect clean-slate technology that doesn't mimic our complex cultures and human attributes would result in an even more consequential outcome.  

This research serves as the grounds to my designs for the world setting at the beginning of the adaptation to Childhoods End. 

With this knowledge of technological complexity, the kluge, I can portray humanities chaotic yet functioning environment before the arrival of the Overlords.