Growing Information Systems and Crystals

Main takeaway here is this:

> Information Systems are super-useful for hardening and regularising processes so that they follow standards, run more quickly, cheaply and smoothly and take expensive, error-prone humans out-of-the-loop. The downside is that IS’s are fragile in the face of change.

Author’s view is that this is because of the way they grow and evolve, but to me it seems like it’s part of the nature of software.

AI shows promise in getting computers to behave more flexibly and naturally, and show “graceful degradation”.

I wonder if these techniques should/will ever be applied effectively to get us out of the mess we’re in now.

My view is that they’ll probably just add to the complexity and make things worse