The Empire of Fragility

In Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov describes the slow decay of a civilisation that once conquered the galaxy. Before delving into that decline, we must pay tribute to Asimov himself: a physicist, biologist, and visionary who used science fiction as a vehicle for deep philosophical and societal reflection. Like Philip K. Dick, though with a more rational style, he foresaw the future and dissected the essence of civilisation.

The Empire downfall is not dramatic. It is gradual, quiet, and almost invisible from within. The Empire does not collapse because of war or invasion, but because its people forget how to maintain what their ancestors built. They rely on systems they no longer understand, worship technology as ritual, and assume progress will continue by inertia.

This image is more than science fiction. It is a mirror. Every civilisation that loses the ability, or the will, to maintain its own foundations begins to rot from within. Knowledge becomes doctrine. Craft becomes compliance. The capacity to build fades first in the hands, then in the mind.

The comfort of assembly

We live in an era of abundance and abstraction. We have learned to assemble faster than we understand. The art of software, once the craft of those who shaped systems with clarity and intent, now too often resembles furniture assembly: select pre-built components, connect them with just enough glue, and declare victory. It is worth remembering that the pioneers who shaped IT often came from physics and electronics, people who truly understood how things worked at their core. LISP was created by a physicist, and the invention of the computer mouse was first an electronic innovation before becoming a software interface. Their grounding in the physical world gave depth to their digital creations.

We have turned modularity into a moral excuse. Abstraction was once a tool for comprehension. Today it is a shield against it. “Do not reinvent the wheel” has evolved into “do not bother understanding how the wheel works.”

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there is a moment that captures this decay perfectly. Captain Kirk demonstrates to a young officer how to enter the ship’s command code, reminding him that “you need to understand how a ship works.” The message is timeless: one cannot command what one does not comprehend. The same applies to our teams, our systems, and our organisations.

Leaders today speak of leverage, scalability, and speed, yet few speak of comprehension. We build more, faster, but do we truly understand what we are building? Depending on one’s focus, pure engineering or strategic leadership, there are internal gears that must be seen or at least perceived. An engineer must understand the principles behind virtualisation, while a strategist must grasp how humans connect, how objectives drive delivery, and how incremental slicing keeps the system moving forward.

You are not a Kubernetes expert because you can write a Terraform template, and you are not agile because you blindly follow a protocol or fill OKRs. You have to understand the how. Otherwise, we are simply stacking parts until the tower sways.

The seduction of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence could have become the telescope of our age. A tool to help us see further, reason faster, and discover new frontiers. Instead, it risks becoming our cognitive sofa: a place to rest while it thinks for us.

AI offers predictions, drafts, and insights at astonishing speed. But every convenience has a cost. The more we outsource understanding, the less we practise it. When engineers use AI to write code they cannot explain, when leaders use it to decide without questioning, and when companies treat it as a substitute for curiosity, we step closer to Asimov’s Empire: gleaming on the surface, hollow beneath.

One might ask: how many engineers using AI today have ever implemented a simple machine learning algorithm, such as gradient descent, to truly understand what happens under the surface?

True progress multiplies comprehension. Fragile progress replaces it.

The decline of maintenance culture

Maintenance used to be the backbone of engineering pride. To maintain something required knowing how it worked, where it failed, and how to make it endure. In Asimov’s decaying Empire, maintenance becomes ceremony: technicians perform rituals without grasping purpose, priests recite manuals they no longer understand.

It is a chilling reflection: when understanding fades, action becomes imitation, and imitation requires no more than the mechanical obedience of a low threshold mind. It is frightening to realise that tasks executed blindly may need no more than the cognitive diligence of a 65 IQ. This is not said to be disrespectful, but to underline the danger of reducing complex work to rote execution. The maintenance of an aircraft engine or a critical medical device, for example, demands comprehension far beyond obedience, because lives depend on it.

In our industry, maintenance has become synonymous with boredom, refactoring with delay, and documentation with bureaucracy. We celebrate building new features but ignore the quiet excellence of keeping things working well. That neglect accumulates like rust. It corrodes culture.

An organisation that no longer values maintenance will one day wake up to discover that its systems, like its principles, no longer function.

Leadership through comprehension

“Leadership is not about control, but comprehension — the art of seeing how things connect.”

Leadership begins where comprehension begins. True leaders do not merely assemble teams and frameworks. They cultivate understanding. Leaders do not need to be deeply technical, but they must perceive the complex assembly of teams, the execution of frictionless processes, and the deep semantics behind well-crafted OKRs or KPIs. In that sense, abstraction and the ability to conceptualise are pervasive. They do not fear complexity but strive to make it legible.

Understanding how things work is not nostalgia, but resilience. It is how antifragile organisations emerge: by preserving the ability to reason about cause and effect, by valuing those who can still read the schematics, trace the current, and explain why the system behaves as it does.

Examples of this mindset are visible in organisations that blend technical mastery with strategic clarity. At SpaceX, engineers and leaders share an intimate understanding of systems, from materials to mission operations. Abstraction never becomes detachment. Everyone knows enough of the machinery to reason, decide, and act.

At Amazon, comprehension operates at a different layer. Leaders connect teams, metrics, and customer outcomes with surgical precision. OKRs are not bureaucratic artefacts but semantic anchors that turn strategy into execution. Both companies show that true leadership does not mean knowing everything: it means understanding enough of how things work to make systems cohere.

The more layers of abstraction we build, the more deliberate our effort to keep comprehension alive must become. Such organisations thrive not because they avoid abstraction, but because they master it with purpose. Otherwise, we create empires of fragility. Shiny, fast, and doomed.

Rediscovering progress as leverage for progress

The promise of technology was never comfort. It was capacity. Progress should compound curiosity, not replace it. Each innovation ought to become a stepping stone for further mastery, not a justification for detachment.

When abstraction serves comprehension, it builds leverage. When it replaces it, it breeds dependence. Leaders must therefore teach their organisations to climb both sides of the ladder: to abstract where needed, but also to descend and inspect the machinery beneath.

To understand is to own. To own is to care. And to care is the foundation of endurance.

The quiet collapse

Civilisations do not fall because they lack resources. They fall because they stop paying attention. Asimov’s Empire perished not through battle, but through neglect: the slow erosion of craftsmanship, the loss of technical literacy, and the surrender of curiosity.

We risk the same fate when we confuse automation with understanding, or when we let artificial intelligence replace the very intelligence it was meant to augment.

Progress does not forgive arrogance. Systems do not maintain themselves. And no empire, however vast or digital, survives the death of comprehension.