Thanks for the film recommendation. In a similar vein, I'd recommend Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Econ

Thanks for the film recommendation. In a similar vein, I'd recommend Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, which deals a lot with complexity of large systems and their parallels to biology and evolution. I do think it's possible to create a system of "significant complexity" in a clean and not so evolutionary way, but only after creating a version or two that were developed incrementally, which necessarily end up with a lot of cruft.