Sublime

“We have been designing complex systems whose active components are variable and highly non-linear components called people, without characterizing these components or their effect on the system being designed,”

The Properties of Complex Systems We have few general design principles for adaptive components (cells, organisms, nations) in isolation or in the aggregate where new unforeseen properties emerge. Components typically have high failure rates in all tasks and accomplish their objectives through statistical averaging and approximation across multiple

Even if a system has the same setup – in our case, the same systematic intern, the same rule for changing shelf, the same number of files and the same number of shelves – there can be a wide range of outputs, or in other words a wide range of dynamical behaviors. One such example is Chaos, but there are others.

But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence—a deck of attributes that have proved ill suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend.