Fernando J. Corbato in his 1991 Turing Lecture On Building Systems That Will Fail said:

What I am really trying to address is the class of systems that for want of a better phrase, I will call "ambitious systems." It almost goes without saying that ambitious systems never quite work as expected. Things usually go wrong and sometimes in dramatic ways. And this leads me to my main thesis, namely, that the question to ask when designing such systems is not: "if something will go wrong, but when will it?"

All inventions are, to follow his definition, seeds of ambitious systems.

need to work through this paper to extract good complexity/scalability problems