The Optimization Trap: Efficiency, Complexity, and Systemic Resilience

This interdisciplinary conference examines when advances in efficiency, automation, and coordination strengthen systemic resilience and when they instead create complexity, hidden dependencies, or the loss of structural margins. The inquiry grew out of spectrum-management concerns, draws lessons from other technical and institutional domains, and returns those insights to the spectrum community.

The conference is intended to frame an important and insufficiently examined problem, test it against experience, and identify questions that deserve further research and policy attention. It is not premised on the view that efficiency is inherently hostile to resilience or that a single institutional remedy is already known.

The Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Colorado Law School.