While odd and improbable things do happen in the natural world (meteors, volcanoes, earthquakes), they happen without human participation. When living organisms that have free will interact with natural systems (whether they be amoebas or humans), the probabilities become much less useful.

Without weighing in on the pros and cons of trillions being spent, I am highly confident that both unexpectedly great and unexpectedly horrible things will occur again in the next 50 years.

To answer your question on 5, there is a concept called “Six Sigma Quality”… which was (ironically) devised by Motorola. Basically it means that the item will only fail after six standard deviations (> 99.997% reliablity). Depending on the system, that may be 6 sigma hours, 6 sigma iterations, 6 sigma stress. This is a common approach to designing disk drives and other mission critical stuff.

An example: if I drop my laptop computer from my desk, it will probably break. But if I bought a “ToughBook Computer,” it will survive that stress. For this “quality,” the Toughbook costs roughly 4x the price of the laptop. That is an anecdote which answers your question. This is entirely a function of design/cost/reliability.

An engineer can build a system which can withstand 7 sigma, 8 sigma, 9 sigma events. At some point, however, there is an exponentially- marginally diminishing return on the improvement. (Although plaintiffs’ lawyers will argue otherwise Additionally, there will ALWAYS be some unanticipated stress that will get ya. (For example, the computer may be able to withstand a rooftop drop, but the software virus that you caught from Facebook will erase your hard drive.)

Also, the cost to replace or modify an existing system is often an order of magnitude higher than the cost of building a new system (Big Dig in Boston for example). Thanks again for the visit.

Here are some other possible explanations — for your excellent post:

1) Behind every new complex, man-made system (from Ipods to CDO’s) is a salesman who gets paid based on his ability to sell it. And a team of professionals whose existence is based on supporting the complex system.
2)On the buy side, how many purchasers are motivated by “keeping up with the Jones’” (i.e. status) versus utility?
3)Reading and writing is a complex and difficult activity, but because we learned how to do it as children, we take it for granted. The knowledge, effort and time required to run and maintain a typical PC is substantial, but more burdensome because we’ve learned to do it as adults AND it’s constantly changing.
4) As you correctly observe, from my systems engineer point of view, EVERYTHING is a complex system. However, one does not need to understand molecular biology to enjoy (or despise) an Egg McMuffin; anymore than one needs to understand particle physics to use a flash drive; or to understand macroeconomics and payment systems to cash a social security check.
5) Complexity is one byproduct of the specialization of labor that our civilization’s developed. Yet all great systems share the traits of simplicity for end users, idiot-proofness, robustness and redundancy.
Back at NASA, we called that “Fault Tolerant Systems.”

Don – Funny but they certainly speak volumes! Thanks again!

A little cog in the system (but which system?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wh2b1eZFUM

The ‘efficient’ system – Ministry of Information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xNnRBksvOU&feature=related

Harry Tuttle – Heating Engineer/Wanted Guerilla Freedom Fighter (Robert De Niro), operating on the living innards of a housing system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosrujtjJHA&feature=related
(without the required paperwork!)

Jeff