Fragility. That's what the news says. Blizzards made it impossible to deliver coal on China's fragile rail network, so power is out in frozen China. A boat anchor sliced a fragile undersea information pipeline, and the internet drops out in the Middle East. These systems are just like glass or origami, you know? Breathe on them and they just wilt.
Fragility, though, implies that we can bulk it up. That these systems can be strengthened to withstand impacts. Or, to put it another way, that we can make this stuff not be news anymore.
That overlooks a couple of traits of complex systems. First, it assumes that they fail slowly, in ways you can prepare for. Second, it kind of implies that by adding more complexity to the system, we can make it better.
Neither of these things turns out to be true. Prove it, you say? Well, the idea isn't new, but let's see how it broke down in this case. Here's how the internet crashed:
Link: Cable damage hits Internet connectivity-India-The Times of India.
An anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged Indian-owned FLAG cable and also SEA-ME-WE on Wednesday morning and urgent repair teams had set sail for the location. An official of Reliance group, which owns FLAG, said the repair will take about 10 days.
Apart from the sea of acronyms, what happened is basically that a boat put it anchor in the wrong place.
One problem with infrastructure, then, is that it relies on these bottlenecks, these critical junctures that connect different systems. They might be the connections between different power systems, for instance, or just the exit ramp off the nearest interstate. These things tend to be fragile and overloaded. Making the cable stronger doesn't change the fact that there's no failover--and it tends to make it a more viable target.
Build it stronger and you've just got a more resource intensive bottleneck that will cause even more chaos when it breaks. And it will break rapidly, and all at once. Let's look at the consequences in China:
Link: The Associated Press: Chinese Fight to Get Home Amid Blizzard.
Crowds of frantic Chinese fought for seats Wednesday on the few trains leaving southern China, where the worst winter storms in half a century have crippled the nation's transport system during its busiest travel season....The storms have caused dozens of deaths and airport closures. China's antiquated power grid, powered largely by coal, ground to a near halt, plunging many cities into darkness. The storms have caused economic losses of $3 billion since they began Jan. 10, the Civil Affairs Ministry said Tuesday.....When bus doors finally opened, women started screaming in the mob. Others discarded their trampled luggage. Mothers holding babies stood nearby, looking despondent.
We feel like we can count on our infrastructure. But it was engineered to live within a narrow set of specifications - certain temperature and weather pattern assumptions; assumptions that excess economic capacity will be available for maintenance; antiquated threat assumptions. Day by day, the world is proving each assumption untrue.
The problem we face as those assumptions change won't just be the bottlenecks. These systems won't go gently into any good night. They will rage, and lock, and then be gone.
Imagine a complex system as a set of interlocking, moving gears. Those gears might be massively engineered, and strong as hell, but something can still slip in between them. Something cheap and small that nobody would suspect will disrupt one of the gears. A small one, just some insignificant piece of the whole. A rail car can't get to a power plant, say.
But what happens then to a complex system - if the disruption is above a certain level - is that the whole system gets overwhelmed. The power plant calls frantically for coal, which is rerouted to meet it and then stalled, blocking part of the tracks which makes other cars not able to make get to other power plants which prevents clean-up crews from clearing the first affected parts of the track. And so on.
See? The connectivity of the system causes a cascading systems failure that spreads to everything it touches. And if it touches everything, everything will go down.
Now, that's not an apocalypse. It's more like a systems reboot for the whole freaking world. If we're rich enough, and have enough technical capacity, we can totally pull that off, no problem. Just like we recovered after the 2003 blackouts. Just like China and Dubai are going to fix it, now.
But, you know, China has already lost $3 billion and is getting trapped in an inflationary spiral. So we maybe want to start saving up.
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