By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Complexity Crisis Nobody’s Preparing For
By 2040, you’ll own or interact with autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, delivery drones, smart home systems, medical devices, and infrastructure so complex that when they break—and they will break—almost nobody will know how to fix them. We’re building a world of sophisticated machines faster than we’re training people to maintain them, and the gap between complexity and repair capability is widening catastrophically.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’re imagining robots repairing robots, AI diagnosing AI, autonomous systems maintaining themselves. That’s the fantasy. The reality is a brutal 15-20 year transition period where machines break constantly, repair expertise is scarce, and downtime costs escalate exponentially because we built complexity faster than we built the maintenance culture to support it.
This isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s an approaching crisis that will reshape labor markets, create massive business opportunities, and determine which technologies actually scale versus which ones fail because nobody can keep them running.
Continue reading… “The Coming Maintenance Apocalypse: When Everything Breaks and Nobody Knows How to Fix It”
