The Cost of Complexity

Maybe you would rather drive this than your current ride?

In the past, the devices we used were a lot simpler, and we expected to know how they worked. For example, people used to service and repair their own cars before they became loaded with onboard computers. When I was a kid, my grandfather had a collection of vintage cars that he would keep running in his spare time. He would complain about how finicky some of them were, but they pretty much all ran, and he was by no means a professional mechanic.

To give an example of how things differed 100 years ago from what we have today, the original Model T Ford even came with a user manual that ran owners through performing common service procedures on the car.¹ There were probably a lot fewer repair shops back then, and people were used to maintaining their own devices. Today’s car manuals just tell you what the various lights on the dashboard do, and which ones mean that you need to go to the dealer so they can plug in a device and pull a code.

Things have gotten a lot better

This is not to say that things were better in the “good old days.” Today’s cars are faster, safer, more reliable, and run cleaner than most models from even 10 years ago. I’m confident that a new-model Honda Civic is superior in nearly every way than an early Ford, even if the latter was completely user-serviceable where the former is pretty much a black box to you or…