The law of stretched (cognitive) systems

Poignant read on how demand (“burden” in his wording) inevitably expands to reach and strain capacity, both for computers and humans:

Fred Hebert at My Bad Opinions: The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems

… Engineers tend to operate under the idea that the work they’re doing is going to make someone’s life easier, lower barriers of entry, or just make things simpler by making them understandable.

While this is a worthy objective that I think we are helping, I also hold the view that any such improvements would be used to expand the capacities of the system such that its burdens remain roughly the same.

What is available will be used.

(Don’t have a link handy right now, but I recall hearing something similar about highway design. Roughly recalled: Adding more lanes to a freeway rarely improves traffic bottlenecks. New traffic joins the freeway and the experience often remains similarly stagnant.)