193 - Silent Catalyst

Walking to a local grocery store in Bali, as I've done many times over the past month, I was reminded of the critical importance of infrastructure, how every other physically dependent domain suffers from the lack of it, and the benefits that are possible but not encouraged by the effective integration of services and data.

For context, the popular regions of Bali are home to levels of traffic you might see in Bangkok, a city with 10 times the population, but Bali has none of the infrastructure. This means that parking, sidewalks, crosswalks, intersections with lights, and roads with sufficient lanes to handle traffic are all very lacking, causing a 10 km trip to take an hour by taxi. The result is a heavy reliance on motorbikes, risky and aggressive drivers, parking on sidewalks, and constant traffic jams.

It is also an example of a region with very patchwork development, and plenty of empty lots because lacking proper infrastructure the area can't accommodate greater density. This is of course a hyper-complex problem to solve, and one requiring many steps to meaningfully address. The core problem is also shared globally, as with virtually all hyper-complex problems, including systemic housing crises in the UK and NL, as well as "grade D-" infrastructure like a national electrical grid decades past its expiration date in the US.

Infrastructure has one of the broadest impacts on a region, but paradoxically it also suffers from being the most frequently ignored or sidelined for the same reason, because the harms and the gains are maximally distributed across relevant metrics. This is a consequence of the Cognitive Bias versus Complexity trade-off, as humans are unable to cope with hyper-complexity absent simplification methods that severely skew such maximally distributed effects.

Not only does this cause and exacerbate various societal harms, but it also systematically overlooks opportunities to solve problems by deploying multi-domain solutions. For example, any of those empty lots and the sheet metal shacks next to many of them could be selectively bought by the local government and used to create some of the missing infrastructure. Other lots not in suitable positions could be turned into multi-family housing facilities and offered as condos that some of those currently in sheet metal shacks could own in exchange for land the local government could redevelop into much-needed infrastructure.

Another example applies to corporate opportunities, like taking a popular inventory management system and integrating it with various delivery services, as well as offering insights and recommendations to the stores integrating with it to help them optimize their supply chain. The data could tell stores where people are ordering what products are delivered, as well as any patterns in that demand. Customers and stores alike could benefit strongly from a centralized database of products, leaving each product to only require the information for it to be added once, then selected rather than input by individual stores, and translated only once to any relevant languages.

Scalable intelligence is required to implement these kinds of solutions well, but the technology exists, it only requires proper funding.