James Drogan

Information Management students and I are engaged in a discussion of IoT and the attendant issue of complexity.

In response the following was posted.

"The growing complexity of the technological systems, their reach and range, the speed of development suggest the need for new approachs to systems design, implementation, vetting, and operation.

Perhaps our design goals should change, moving away from large complex systems, to a network of small systems with appropriate safeguards in the network connections and an ability to disconnect a small system from the network very rapidly.

We might learn from nature.  Yesterday's feed from Fermat's Library brought me the following.

"You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better."
- P. A. M. Dirac

This is a quote from this week's paper "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature" published in 1963 by P. Dirac, one of the brightest minds of the 20th century.

Which reminded me of Bejan, A., & Zane, J. P. (2012). Design in Nature: How The Constructal Law Governs Evolution In Biology, Physics, Technology, And Social Organization (1st ed). New York: Doubleday.

We understand parts of nature, but not all of it.  Nature has withstood the tests of time and man.  Maybe if we understood nature's design better we could design better systems.

I'm going off the reservation here, but maybe we need to go off the reservation."