A major thesis of this text is that the complexity of computer hardware and software systems has exceeded our current understanding of how these systems work and fail, and furthermore, these systems are approaching the complexity of biological systems based on their cardinality and their networked hierarchy due to the widespread connectivity of the Internet and World Wide Web.

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Although measuring network complexity remains an active area of research, efforts to quantify the concepts of node degree and dependence are confirming the fundamental hypothesis of network and complex systems researchers across multiple disciplines that relationship transitivity matters more than often credited in the traditional Newtonian-Cartesian ethic rooted in linear cause-and-effect, decomposability, reductionism, foreseeability of harm, time reversibility, and an obsession with finding broken parts and blaming people that still dominates mainstream intellectual theory and practice in accident investigations, the law, and systems engineering.