By Ignacio Lirio

These days everyone’s excited talking about Big Data, IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI). And how this is going to be the next Big Thing in tech business. A myriad of new start-up companies are flourishing all around, trying to get ready to take their share in this party.

This is probably true, but all this hype doesn’t come alone. There are far more articles talking about the wonders of technology rather than its dark side. And this may mislead some people to a dead-end.

I’ve been working with software for most of my life. I’ve been studying Complexity for many years as well, a subject that amazes me. And one of the conclusions I reach is that we basically deal with two kinds of complexity: Natural and Artificial. I won’t talk about the complexity of nature in this article (I guess you’re already pretty aware of it) but about Artificial Complexity (AC from now) that is the one we humans create.

And just because giving a complex definition of AC will be the best way to drive this article to its “death by self-referentiality”, I will define AC using plain, natural language:

Artificial Complexity is what happens when it takes infinite time to walk into a place that is just in front of you

If you survived to reach this paragraph, then let’s go for a more formal, scientific, but still simple definition:

AC is the measure of the difference between the standard distance* and the real distance.

How many times your technology project has been stalled in an apparently simple step (that your customer will never understand)?

How often the costs of a development have been rising abruptly because of a relatively small missing piece?

I’ve been running a blog (in spanish) about procrastination for many years. I got thousands of testimonials from users that found it (in the middle of their procrastination crisis) and read it. Most of their stories sound so similar: they got stuck in front a blank page. It’s the last chapter of their novel, their thesis, their essay, a proposal… but they’re blocked. After been restlessly walking all the way, they find that the last step takes forever.

Why it’s so difficult?

AC is the hidden poison behind every technology. In his famous booklet The Laws of Simplicity (a must!) designer and author John Maeda explains the keys that makes things become artificially complex. One of them, if not the main, is multiplicity. Less is More, you know. But how many people do know that as well?

I love web development. I heart Javascript since I started to learn it 18 years ago. But I’m fed up these days. I just gave up following experts about web development in social media because the amount of JS frameworks in the market has insanely grown up to almost nonsense. When dealing for your next big web project, you’re probably get lost in that framework jungle, just deciding where to go or what to choose.

Same situation applies to almost any other technologies.

So, if you ever experience this at any stage of your project development, if you are able to step back and notice that you walked many steps at the same pace but the next one is taking forever, it means that you are probably trapped in an AC cage you must escape as soon as possible.

And this means in most of the times that you may need to break up something, burn something of even reset it all. It’s worth the action. You may be the responsible of your AC trap or you may be not. Software developers, bureaucracy administrators, etc. they make artificially complex things you may deal with, entangled machines built upon already entangled bases that are designed to ensure you will get stuck sooner or later. But, guess what? these things are advertised and sold like magical solutions, like wonderful tools under appealing brand names, that you need to buy and use to succeed. For Salesmen and Marketers AC doesn’t exist. It’s probably forbidden for them (it they get to know what the hell it is).

So take care, evaluate well, go Zen and remember that Less is More :-)

(*) Here ‘standard distance’ refers to Euclidean distance. That is, the straight line that connects two points in regular geometric space.