The Weight of Progress
Systems that grow beyond their usefulness—and collapse under their own weight
From the essay
I explore a recurring pattern in the evolution of complex systems: success produces growth; growth produces weight; and weight, beyond a certain point, undermines usefulness. This pattern appears across civilizations, biological evolution, scientific disciplines, and modern technologies. I focus on two contemporary case studies that mirror each other despite being at different stages of maturity: high-energy physics, a triumphant scientific enterprise now confronting diminishing conceptual returns despite escalating energy and infrastructural demands, and artificial intelligence, a rapidly expanding technology already exhibiting similar dependencies on brute-force scaling and energy consumption. To complete the picture, I outline a third domain—biological and civilizational systems—where analogous dynamics have played out repeatedly across deep time.
Adapted from PDF pages 1.