[kurthr]

Complex systems are by definition high dimensional. We often build them with fault tolerance and soft "failure modes" to prevent catastrophic events. However, the dimensionality and complexity mean that almost every sufficiently complex system is ALWAYS running in a "degraded" mode. However once this is normalized, the failure when it occurs is usually catastrophic, and determining proximate cause (often work grouped as "root cause"), much less fixing it, is made even more difficult.

The rapid exponential growth in complexity seen in semi over many decades has created guardrails (eg horrific yield/field failures) in modeling and verification that prevent a lot of problems. I do worry that as Moore slows (multi-chip modules are not Dennard scaling) we will lose some of this anti-fragility.

Of course the other side of this is Muntzing (the removal of any part that doesn't cause immediate failure):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing