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.
I wouldn't call less than 30 minutes[1] "an absurdly long amount of time". I've lost a car due to all the oil leaking before. I don't even think it lasted ten minutes after the low oil light popped up (I was in the middle of an expressway), and that engine was toast afterwards. I had it pop up another time for another car and thankfully I was two minutes away from an exit to an oasis and got oil into it pretty quickly.
If you mean an EV car then that's not fair, it's not designed to use oil, that's like saying a human can survive an absurdly long time without eating dirt.
[1]: https://www.matfoundrygroup.com/blog/can-you-run-an-engine-w...
Pretty sure they were referring to storing a car for a long time (months or longer) without any oil in it. Not trying to operate the ICE car without oil in it.
Actually there’s enough evidence at this point that you can, you just have to do it on the cellular level, not tissue level, and the hardest problem for therapies in living humans is not creating cancer at the same time.
Partial reprogramming (resetting methylation status on the DNA) looks like the most important maintenance to do inside the human cells, but there are other known problems with partly known solutions.
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.
When I say that we are fragile I mean that we physically are.
One Mike Tyson's punch in my face and there's a good chance I'll suffer grave damages or worse.
An hippopotamus would probably not even feel it.
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
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.
But when these feedback loops break, for whatever reason-- reaching the limits of the elasticity and controls, for instance-- they tend to abruptly de-compensate and fall apart.
This looks sudden: more and more slack is being taken up, until the actual compensatory mechanism is exhausted, and then smack, it's all over.
It's like when you get hypothermia, and then vasoconstriction to maintain core temperature stops... and you start shedding lots of heat through your skin, and shivering ends... then you feel hot and want to take off your clothes. Your body is doing many different kinds of things to try and fight getting cold, and once one falls apart "because it's too cold" -- the rest fall like dominoes.
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.
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)
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.