David Korowicz video on Complexity

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Physicist David Korowicz documents the disturbing growth in the complexity of trade and financial networks and in the various types of infrastructure. He sees the collapse process as a system of re-enforcing feedbacks that cut investment in energy and R&D and cause supply chains and IT networks to break down.

Recorded on day two of The New Emergency Conference: Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World held on 10-12 June 2009, All Hallows College, Drumcondra, Dublin 9, Ireland.



Around the 18 minute mark, he reflects on something interesting. If all of the IT infrastructure of the last twenty years suddenly quit, we wouldn't go back to life twenty years ago, it would regress much more deeply in a matter of a few days to life much prior to 1990. Why?


As complex systems grow, interconnections goes up significantly. Also, what we've built in the last twenty years is tuned to the conditions as they have changed over those twenty years. In this there is the notion of collapse, ie. things don't break in a fashion that is  the inverse of assembly. Instead, collapse is a new form of novelty. He doesn't say that exactly but it seems a natural tentative conclusion.