Question
Which industries most depend on things being complicated?
Answer
I am going to interpret this as "needlessly complex" as in, there's no physics-level minimum threshold of complexity. So 'rocket science' actually doesn't qualify. There really is no way you can make rocketry simpler than it is. I can't think of any meaningful way to reduce the complexity of modern airplanes or rockets. None. They HAVE to be that complex. All ideas that have been proposed turn out, upon further analysis, to have simply moved the complexity elsewhere (and in case you wonder, why, yes, I *am* a rocket scientist, as the tee-shirt of our department back in school used to proclaim).
Fields I suspect are more complex than they need to be, and therefore ripe for disruption: finance, legal systems, business management.
In each case, the proof lies in solutions already emerging ("the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.")
For example, fast-track courts and informal mediation models have achieved a triage in many legal systems.
Free-agency organized "business ecosystems" like Linux are a counterexample to the idea that systems that build complex products and services need to be complex themselves in the sense of Microsoft. Yes, these open source examples have more structure internally than people suspect, but still nowhere near as much as traditional corporations. The complexity is moved into the sophistication of interpersonal interactions. Smarter humans, simpler management.
Finance: http://slowmoney.org is one of the indicators that simpler financial systems may be possible, and that far too many people are needlessly employed trying to spot phantoms in fractal graphs and dressing up astrology-based gambling as science simply because they use complicated tools.
It is this lack of proof that makes me suspect that taxation systems are NOT needlessly complex. Their complexity reflects the rich structure of trade-offs and concerns involved in governance. I haven't found a functional "simple" taxation system any more recent than a 1000 years ago, and those didn't work. So while there may be no laws like those in physics (or perhaps there are), the tax system NEEDS to be as labyrinthine as the society it governs.
Fields I suspect are more complex than they need to be, and therefore ripe for disruption: finance, legal systems, business management.
In each case, the proof lies in solutions already emerging ("the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.")
For example, fast-track courts and informal mediation models have achieved a triage in many legal systems.
Free-agency organized "business ecosystems" like Linux are a counterexample to the idea that systems that build complex products and services need to be complex themselves in the sense of Microsoft. Yes, these open source examples have more structure internally than people suspect, but still nowhere near as much as traditional corporations. The complexity is moved into the sophistication of interpersonal interactions. Smarter humans, simpler management.
Finance: http://slowmoney.org is one of the indicators that simpler financial systems may be possible, and that far too many people are needlessly employed trying to spot phantoms in fractal graphs and dressing up astrology-based gambling as science simply because they use complicated tools.
It is this lack of proof that makes me suspect that taxation systems are NOT needlessly complex. Their complexity reflects the rich structure of trade-offs and concerns involved in governance. I haven't found a functional "simple" taxation system any more recent than a 1000 years ago, and those didn't work. So while there may be no laws like those in physics (or perhaps there are), the tax system NEEDS to be as labyrinthine as the society it governs.