Over time our laws, mores, and ethics have slowly expanded the sphere of human empathy. Generally, humans originally identified themselves primarily via their families. ... Gradually the circle of “us” enlarged from inside the family clan to inside the tribe, and then from tribe to nation.

“Discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate,” says sociologist Robert Merton, who studied simultaneous inventions in history. The ever-thickening mix of existing technologies in a society creates a supersaturated matrix charged with restless potential. When the right idea is seeded within, the inevitable invention practically explodes into existence, like an ice crystal freezing out of water.

Yet paradoxically, diversity can be unleashed by a type of uniformity. The uniformity of a standard writing system (like an alphabet or script) unleashes the unexpected diversity of literature. ... The rigidity of an alphabet has done more to enable creativity than any unhinged brain-storming exercise ever invented.

Indeed, an invention or idea is not really tremendous unless it can be tremendously abused. This should be the first law of technological expectation: The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.

This inevitable waste is so harsh and unavoidable that it is astounding that any organization can persist for long without rapidly dissolving to cold equilibrium. Everything we find interesting and good in the cosmos—living organisms, civilization, communities, intelligence, evolution itself—somehow maintains a persistent difference in the face of entropy’s empty indifference.

In each case the minor error triggers, or combines with, other unforeseen consequences in the system, also minor. But because of the tight interdependence of parts, minor glitches in the right improbable sequence cascade until the trouble becomes an unstoppable wave and reaches catastrophic proportions. Sociologist Charles Perrow calls these “normal accidents” because they “naturally” emerge from the dynamics of large systems. The system is to blame, not the operators. Perrow did an exhaustive minute-by-minute study of 50 large-scale technological accidents (such as Three Mile Island, the Bhopal disaster, Apollo 13, Exxon Valdez, Y2K, etc.) and concluded, “We have produced designs so complicated that we cannot anticipate all the possible interactions of the inevitable failures; we add safety devices that are deceived or avoided or defeated by hidden paths in the systems.”