19.3
Emergent properties can’t be inferred / predicted because they are emergent! We talk a lot about the concept of emergent properties in introductory biology. The idea for us is that everything we know and love is made of atoms, but the interesting properties that we experience could never be predicted by just studying the behavior of individual atoms. Biol 101 is about using atoms to build molecules and then living cells that metabolize and reproduce, and we emphasize the amazing properties of photosynthesis and DNA for example that transcend their humble components. In Biol 102 we start with individual organisms and build complex ecosystems with all kinds of emergent interactions that you could never hope to guess. Who would have thought that past viral infections in our genome have become genes that mammal embryos use to implant themselves in the placenta?! Crazy!
So crazy things happen with any complex system, and this is certainly true for sociotechnical systems. I think of the latest round of massive DDOS attacks launched by IoT devices as a harmful emergent property of wireless components, and I would also point to the social and political impacts of Twitter as emergent properties of a mobile app. It would be nice to be able to include as much of the sociotechnical system as possible during the engineering process, but often times we probably just have to rely on engineered resilience to account for crazy things we’ll never be able to plan for. Expect the unexpected.