September 26, 2026
Our existence is surprisingly precarious. There are the random risks we think about, like being struck by a runaway bus on the street. There are also the societal risks we are blissfully unaware of. One which lies in between is the existence of modern supply chains.
There is this image of packaged items which read “grown in X, packaged in Y, for sale in Z,” which implies, “Why have these chains?” The simple answer is that this is the most efficient method to do things. If one area is best for growing, another for packaging, and multiple consumers exist, this distribution will come about naturally as one settles to minimal cost (as well, minimal cost is often correlated with carbon minimization as fuel also costs money!). There is nothing inherently wrong with this in a stable system.
Stability is the unquestioned assumption of our times. We ignore compounding failures at our peril. For example, what if a singular producer of an item on which an entire group of products depends goes down? This would probably be bad—I’d hope there is someone keeping track of that for downstream items critical to civilization. For the most part I doubt anyone is (unless one watches these with particular interest). Alternately, all factories may be affected in similar ways as we saw during COVID, causing time delays. A constraint on some products is that they have shelf lives and due dates! Or, the procurement of a downstream item is premised on an upstream rate.
Due to comparative advantages, these supply chains may stretch across geographies and years. One would again hope there is some sort of supply czar tracking these 100-node deep chains of products—there probably isn’t, as this sort of system is usually formed bottom-up rather than top-down. As no single person knows the whole shape of these systems, rebuilding them under duress is quite difficult, if not impossible.
The type of scenario which keeps me up at night is neither artificial intelligence nor pandemics, but rather these cascade failures, during which we realize that no one has the skillset to perform an important task anymore. It’s the kind of role which doesn’t exist as it wouldn’t need to in the perfect world. While I like to think that we live in the best of all possible worlds, we ought to think as if we weren’t in one.