Limits of Automata—Then and Now: Challenges of Architecture, Brittleness, and Scale

Abstract

Two trajectories underway transform human systems. Processes of growth/complexification have accelerated as stakeholders seek advantage from advances in connectivity/autonomy/sensing. Surprising empirical patterns also arise—puzzling collapses of critical valued services occur against a background of growth. In parallel, new scientific foundations have arisen from diverse directions explaining the observed anomalies and breakdowns, highlighting basic weaknesses of automata regardless of technology. Conceptual growth provides laws, theorems, and comprehensive theories that encompass the interplay of autonomy/people and complexity/adaptation across scales. One danger for synchronizing the trajectories is conceptual lag as researchers remain stuck in stale frames unable to keep pace with transformative change. Any approach that does not either build on the new conceptual advances—or provide alternative foundations—is no longer credible to match the scale and stakes of modern distributed layered systems and overcome the limits of automata. The paper examines longstanding challenges by contrasting progress then as the trajectories gathered steam, to situation now as change has accelerated.