Vernor Vinge described a version of this in A Deepness in the Sky. I agree it’s an important topic and don’t recall anyone else talk about it until now, or anyone talk about it in a non-fiction context, so I’m glad to see this post. From Vinge’s novel:
“The flexibility of the governance is its life and its death. They’ve accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . .”
“But we knew—I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins.”
Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still—“In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand.” If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
Vernor Vinge described a version of this in A Deepness in the Sky. I agree it’s an important topic and don’t recall anyone else talk about it until now, or anyone talk about it in a non-fiction context, so I’m glad to see this post. From Vinge’s novel: