The Tyranny of Optimization

I am staring at a red light the size of a fist. It’s pulsating slowly, mocking the $2,505,000 system it represents. The panel reads: FAULT: SYSTEM INTEGRITY LOST (S345). The fully automated inert gas fire suppression system, the pride of the new data center, won’t reset. Not because of heat, or smoke, or even a pressure drop. It’s because of five miserable seconds of brownout that happened three hours ago.

The power flickered, the system went into emergency lockout, and now, it requires a Level 5 security clearance technician to physically override the software. The technician, of course, is in Singapore until Tuesday. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

This is the tyranny of optimization. This is what happens when we replace robust, simple common sense with brittle, complex perfection. And it gets under my skin like a paper cut-a tiny, absurdly painful injury from something as mundane as an envelope, reminding you how easily simple, sharp edges can halt complex movements.

Expensive, Slow, Meat-Based Middleware

We have created magnificent technological monoliths built on foundations of sand, designed to eliminate the fallibility of the human element. The unintended consequence? We eliminated the human element’s resilience and its singular ability to pivot when the planned path dissolves. We lost the knowledge of how to ‘just make it work.’

Avery is a wind turbine technician, one of the best, working on those enormous 245-foot towers off the coast. Avery tells me the biggest headaches aren’t catastrophic structural failures, but incredibly minor software issues. A $5 sensor on the yaw drive reports thermal creep incorrectly, and the entire 4.5-megawatt turbine shuts down. It doesn’t degrade gracefully, reducing output slightly. It performs an instant, total, non-negotiable shutdown. Fail hard.

That perfectly encapsulates the contradiction. We invested heavily to remove us from the loop, only to discover that the loop requires a human exception handler, an emergency override key. We didn’t eliminate human labor; we merely relocated it from productive maintenance to reactive, high-stakes babysitting of digital infants.

Simple systems fail simply. A fuse blows. You replace the fuse. Complex systems fail complexly. They generate cascading errors, often masking the initial fault beneath 500 lines of inscrutable log data that only three people globally are qualified to interpret-and two of them are on vacation until the 25th.

The Cost of Brittleness: A Comparison

The Blind Spot of Elegance

I made a similar mistake back in ’15. We were migrating our internal invoicing system to a new cloud platform, leveraging advanced, AI-driven reconciliation. I was so focused on the elegance of the data flow that I completely overlooked the need for an accessible manual override for batch upload errors.

When a supplier sent a file with an unexpected date format-25/12/2015 instead of the standard 2015-12-25-the entire $575,000 system locked up. It interpreted the contradiction as a malicious attack and initiated a hard quarantine. For 45 hours, we couldn’t process a single invoice.

It’s a hard lesson: high-tech systems are designed for highly probable scenarios. Humans, with their unpredictable intuition, are designed for improbable scenarios. When we replace the human, we remove the capacity to handle the improbable.

Simplicity is Robustness

We often criticize the ‘old ways’-the grease-stained manuals, the clunky physical controls. Those systems, however, degraded gracefully. If a solenoid failed on an old mechanism, you could often manually actuate the valve. If a computer fails now, the entire physical process it controls often becomes inaccessible, locked behind cryptographic keys. The machine is telling us, quite literally, ‘You are not authorized to fix me.’

Avery L.-A. constantly campaigns for simple, hard-wired manual controls to be reinstated on the base of every turbine tower-not for normal operation, but solely for emergency diagnostics that bypass the software entirely. “Just give me the keys to the physical house,” Avery says. “I don’t want to argue with the $1,505 firewall about why I need to reset a relay.”

The obsession with reducing error rates to zero has birthed systems so tightly bound that a single, unforeseen variable causes an absolute, total failure that requires exponentially more time and money to fix than the original problem was worth.

As I wait for the plane carrying the one person in the world who can legally type the right five digits into a proprietary system to reactivate our fire suppression and save our company from paying out another $25,000 in emergency labor costs, I have to ask: Are we transforming our businesses, or simply building extraordinarily expensive, highly fragile digital temples dedicated to the myth of infallibility?

For proven, robust analog redundancy when digital perfection fails, consider reliable human oversight:

The Fast Fire Watch Company.