The distinction you are making between robustness and resilience was not previously familiar to me but seems useful. Thank you.
Obviously, “no significant technological advances” is a basically impossible scenario. I just mean it as a baseline. If you’re able to handle techno-stagnation in all domains you’re able to handle any permutation of stagnating domains.
I think the distinction is quite important. People frequently centralize systems to make them more robust. To big to fail banks are more robust than smaller banks.
On the other hand they don’t provide a resilience. If one breaks down your screwed.
Italy political system isn’t as robust as the system of Saudi Arabia but probably more resilient.
There are often cases where systems get more robust if you reduce diversity but that also reduces resilience.
If you’re able to handle techno-stagnation in all domains you’re able to handle any permutation of stagnating domains.
You don’t. If technology A posits risk X and you need technology B to prevent risk X you are screwed in a world with A and not B but okay in a world without A and B.
When doing future planning it’s better to take a bunch of different scenarios of how the future could look like and see what your proposals do in each of those than to take the status quo as a scenario.
they don’t provide a resilience. If one breaks down your screwed.
Everything can be broken. It’s a misleading approach to think of robust systems as breakable and resilient systems as not breakable.
Both kinds of systems will break with sufficient damage. Ceteris paribus you can’t even say which one will break first. The difference is basically in how they deal with incoming force: the robust systems will ignore it and resilient systems will attempt to adjust to it. But without looking at specific circumstances you can’t tell beforehand which kind will be able to survive longer or under more severe stress.
There is also the related concept of graceful degradation, by the way.
The distinction you are making between robustness and resilience was not previously familiar to me but seems useful. Thank you.
Obviously, “no significant technological advances” is a basically impossible scenario. I just mean it as a baseline. If you’re able to handle techno-stagnation in all domains you’re able to handle any permutation of stagnating domains.
I think the distinction is quite important. People frequently centralize systems to make them more robust. To big to fail banks are more robust than smaller banks.
On the other hand they don’t provide a resilience. If one breaks down your screwed.
Italy political system isn’t as robust as the system of Saudi Arabia but probably more resilient.
There are often cases where systems get more robust if you reduce diversity but that also reduces resilience.
You don’t. If technology A posits risk X and you need technology B to prevent risk X you are screwed in a world with A and not B but okay in a world without A and B.
When doing future planning it’s better to take a bunch of different scenarios of how the future could look like and see what your proposals do in each of those than to take the status quo as a scenario.
Everything can be broken. It’s a misleading approach to think of robust systems as breakable and resilient systems as not breakable.
Both kinds of systems will break with sufficient damage. Ceteris paribus you can’t even say which one will break first. The difference is basically in how they deal with incoming force: the robust systems will ignore it and resilient systems will attempt to adjust to it. But without looking at specific circumstances you can’t tell beforehand which kind will be able to survive longer or under more severe stress.
There is also the related concept of graceful degradation, by the way.
I think that model works quite well for a lot of practical intervention where people do things to increase robustness that cost resilience.
But you are right that not every robust system will break earlier than every resilient one.