 What was the solution for increased complexity in the late 19th, early 20th century?
Disaster, natural or otherwise, is a breakdown of systems. All we have to rely on are our wits, fortitude, and common humanity Contemporary life is not chaotic, in the colloquial sense we apply to disaster zones. It is, however, complex and rapidly changing; much more so than life was in the past; even the very near past. And from this scale of practical effects, complexity emerges. The Web, after all, is less than a generation old. These two features−the global scale of interdependence of human action, and the systematic acceleration of innovation, make contemporary life a bit like a slow motion disaster, in one important respect. Its very unpredictability makes it unwise to build systems that take too much away from what human beings do best: look, think, innovate, adapt, discuss, learn, and repeat. That is why we have seen many more systems take on a loose, human centric model in the last decade and a half: from the radical divergence of Toyota’s production system from the highly structured model put in place by Henry Ford, to the Internet’s radical departure from the AT&T system that preceded it, and on to the way Wikipedia constructs human knowledge on the fly, incrementally, in ways that would have been seen, until recently, as too chaotic ever to work (and are still seen so be many). Modern Times Modern times were hard enough. Trains and planes, telegraph and telephone, all brought many people into the same causal space.
 The increased role of structure and improved design
 Assembly lines  The increased role of structure and improved design  Complex managed systems  Child labor laws