When I think of failure to scale, I don’t just think of something with high cost (e.g. transmutation of lead to gold), but something that resists economies of scale.
Level 1 resistance is cost-disease-prone activities that haven’t increased efficiency in step with most of our economy, education being a great example. Individual tutors would greatly increase results for students, but we can’t do it. We can’t do it because it’s too expensive. And it’s too expensive because there’s no economy of scale for tutors—they’re not like solar panels, where increasing production volume lets you make them more cheaply.
Level 2 resistance is adverse network effects—the thing actually becomes harder as you try to add more people. Direct democracy, perhaps? Or maintaining a large computer program? It’s not totally clear what the world would have to be like for these things to be solvable, but it would be pretty wild; imagine if the difficulty of maintaining code scaled sublinearly with size!
Level 3 resistance is when something depends on a limited resource and if you haven’t got it, you’re out of luck. Stradivarius violins, perhaps. Or the element europium used in red-emitting phosphor for CRT tubes. Solutions to these, when possible, probably just look like better technology allowing a workaround.
(+2, I really like the breakdown of different effects. I haven’t really tried critically analyzing it for issues, but I definitely feel like it helped carve out/prop up some initial ideas)
Scalability, or cost?
When I think of failure to scale, I don’t just think of something with high cost (e.g. transmutation of lead to gold), but something that resists economies of scale.
Level 1 resistance is cost-disease-prone activities that haven’t increased efficiency in step with most of our economy, education being a great example. Individual tutors would greatly increase results for students, but we can’t do it. We can’t do it because it’s too expensive. And it’s too expensive because there’s no economy of scale for tutors—they’re not like solar panels, where increasing production volume lets you make them more cheaply.
Level 2 resistance is adverse network effects—the thing actually becomes harder as you try to add more people. Direct democracy, perhaps? Or maintaining a large computer program? It’s not totally clear what the world would have to be like for these things to be solvable, but it would be pretty wild; imagine if the difficulty of maintaining code scaled sublinearly with size!
Level 3 resistance is when something depends on a limited resource and if you haven’t got it, you’re out of luck. Stradivarius violins, perhaps. Or the element europium used in red-emitting phosphor for CRT tubes. Solutions to these, when possible, probably just look like better technology allowing a workaround.
Thanks, this was particularly useful for me!
(+2, I really like the breakdown of different effects. I haven’t really tried critically analyzing it for issues, but I definitely feel like it helped carve out/prop up some initial ideas)