Conventional software engineering is extraordinarily brittle, in the sense that any random mutation to a program is likely to cause catastrophic failure: it is

Conventional software engineering is extraordinarily brittle, in the sense that any random mutation to a program is likely to cause catastrophic failure: it is very likely that it will not even be valid anymore, or behave in a completely different way. In this scenario, complexity is the enemy, and we take all the well known-measures that are taken in human engineering to manage complexity. When one dreams of a biological approach, one is interested in replicating the "graceful degradation" aspect of biological structures, which is the opposite of brittleness. If you remove one random cell from your body, it will make virtually no difference. If you remove 1K random cells, you will still not notice anything. If you remove 1M cells, maybe it's not so nice, etc. Biological systems have fewer central points of failure and are much better at adapting to unexpected situations. In this case, complexity can be our friend. I believe it is possible to learn how to design systems more like nature does, and I think this is Kay's dream.