When colleagues and I started to study the reliability of large critical infrastructures—that socio-technical anchorage of the modern—a core paradox confronted us: How can the infrastructures be as reliable as they were with so much that could go so wrong at any second? How could they be managed reliably and safely with so many moving parts and potential interactions?
It’s important to understand that this paradox has been with us from early on. Here is Frederick S. Williams on the British railways from his Our Iron Roads (1883):
This immense number of passengers and enormous bulk of goods are drawn by engines of the most complicated mechanism, held together with millions of rivets, each engine—containing an intricate network of tubes, numerous cranks, and other delicate pieces of workmanship, and the engines and vehicles are connected by chains and couplings. In every separate item of all these innumerable parts lurk elements of danger, and the slightest fracture might produce disaster. All this is done, and with what result? That there is no safer place in the world, as Professor De Morgan said some years ago, and it is still true, than a railway train.
https://archive.org/stream/ourironroadsthei00willrich/ourironroadsthei00willrich_djvu.txt
My own answer to the paradox starts by focusing on the safety and and reliability track records alluded to in the quote.
But it is necessary not to miss the performative, self-referential nature of labelling the initial question “a paradox.” In doing so, I and others demonstrate our own cognitive limits of understanding the systems we study.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 