Speed is a very important thing in late modernity.  It is one of the few things that the various industrial complexes we run our societies on tend to treat as intrinsically valuable (money and size are two others).   Paul Virilio even theorizes contemporary technological society as based almost entirely on what he calls a dromology, an organizing logic of speed that reduces all space, all action, to a series of durations that are always too long. 

Even if Virilio is correct on this point, speed, unlike money, is not quite a universal commodity-fetish capable of standing in for all other values.  We late moderns have no problem conceptualizing a variety of costs of speed.  By "costs" I mean tradeoffs between speed and other valuable things, tradeoffs that we must almost always accept if we want to make something faster.  (By contrast, while we can conceptualize a "cost of money," we can only express it in terms of money, as lost interest or an amount in some competing currency.)  However, we do not always think about whether or not we should pay these costs, or about what our high valuation of speed as a culture might be costing us in general.

For these reasons, I thought that it might be fun to play at developing a taxonomy of these costs.  Here is a preliminary list:

• latency and smoothness (as of mathematical functions): Massaging data into a nice, meaningful form that looks like a nice, differentiable function often requires looking at more than the most recent point(s).  The further back in time one looks, the greater the latency, by definition.  
• latency and error rate / jitter: In a closely related point, demanding reduced latency in any signal makes it more vulnerable to disruption by noise.
• speed and mechanical failure: The faster you make a device go -- whether in terms of rotational / translational velocity or processor cycles per second -- the more stress it places on the device, through frictional force, pressure, heat, etc., and thus increases the number of instances of failure, on average, per unit time.
• speed and accident rate: Similarly, the faster a person is going -- whether in terms of velocity in a vehicle or task completion -- the more likely it is that they will screw up.  There also tends to be a similar relation between speed and accident severity, in that these screwups become not only more frequent but also more consequential.
• development/design/construction speed and quality: As expressed in the old adage: "good, fast, cheap: pick two."
• development/design/construction speed and safety: A close corollary of the "speed and accident rate" relation.  The faster you make something, the more likely it is that someone will get hurt doing it, or that it will fall down at an inopportune time after you are done.
• speed and accuracy: In a wide variety of senses of "accuracy," from accurate responses to posed questions to how quickly one can grab a small object.  In human-computer interaction, this relation is often modeled using Fitts's Law, which predicts that time to complete a pointing task increases as error tolerance decreases (and distance to the target increases).  In psychometrics, it is typically just called the "speed-accuracy tradeoff."

This group of costs could be conceptualized as representing an inverse relationship between speed and reliability.

• time complexity and space complexity: Doing stuff faster usually requires more space.  This vocabulary comes from algorithms design; algorithms designed to work using very little memory generally run slower than algorithms that are allowed to scribble willy-nilly all over the place.  However, this tradeoff often holds true outside of computing environments as well: organizing a 25-sq-ft. room full of boxes takes more time than organizing a 100-sq-ft. room containing the same number of boxes.
• velocity and fuel usage: Making a vehicle go faster requires more fuel, both from the increased fuel required to accelerate it to speed and from the increased fuel required to maintain that speed against increased frictional and drag forces.
• speed and heat: in a closely related note, making things go faster (again, even in terms of processor cycles per second), generally makes them waste a lot of energy as heat.
• rapidity and expense: although "time is money," and doing things quickly can be lucrative, doing things faster often, perversely, costs more.  (Finding the profit-maximizing point in that relationship can be very important for many applications.) Less time for planning means that cost-efficient solutions will rarely be found, workers may need to be paid overtime, etc.  ("Good, fast, cheap" again.)

This group of costs could be conceptualized as representing an inverse relationship between speed and efficiency.

And finally, one other cost that I cannot readily fit into either of the above categories:

• speed and stress: All other things being equal -- and assuming that you start above some fairly low threshold of speed -- doing a task faster (or, similarly, doing more tasks in a given period of time) is more stressful than doing that task more slowly (or completing less tasks in a given period of time).  It is more physically and cognitively demanding, more fatiguing, and creates a greater degree of anxiety.

Other thoughts?

 It’s August 17th, and Atherton is in fine form.  Original blotter text in bold.  Names redacted for politeness.

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08:25 ROAD / SIDEWALK / OTHER HAZARD

Occurred at Encinal Av/Middlefield Rd. hazard in construction zone. Disposition: No Merit.

“Officer, there are all these men putting cones in the road.  Someone could have an accident!”
“Uhh.  Huh.  We’ll get right on that.”

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09:16 ANIMAL CALL

Occurred on Park Dr. Dog barking, This is an on-going issue. RP wants contact. Disposition: Report Taken.

A dog has barked more than once.  This is not only an on-going phenomenon, but an issue, since sounds are not allowed in Atherton.

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14:05 ANIMAL CALL

Officer initiated activity at Selby Ln, Atherton.dog in the roadway. Returned to the owner. Disposition: Assisted.

I don’t know why they’re saving that dog; it’s just going to go bark, and then someone’s going to complain, and then it’s back to pulling a dog cart at the salt mines.

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15:52 DISTURBANCE- NOISE/FIGHT

Occurred on Irving Av. .Heard help and hello in back yard. Special needs subject visiting. No merit. Disposition: Checks Ok.

“OFFICER, THERE IS A PERSON SHOUTING HELLO IN A BACK YARD, AND I GUESS MAYBE ALSO HELP!!!  PLEASE COME DO SOMETHING!”

“We’ll get right on it!”

[…]

“It turns out that there’s no cause for concern, sir, it’s just a person with developmental disabilities who is very friendly.”

“Is that allowed?”

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16:37 MEDICAL AID

Occurred at Laurel School on Edge Rd. . Service Class: BUSN male subject fell and can not get up. Needs fire assistance. Disposition: Outside Assist.

Fire assistance?  Did he fall in the upper branches of a tree?  Is he on fire?

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17:19 PETTY THEFT

Occurred on Heather Dr. subject taking recycling form the bins. White panel truck HM. F----,J---- – 01/14/75 cite 488PC Disposition: Report Taken.

Another member of the South Side Recyclables Theft (and also House Burglary) Gangster Crew, no doubt.

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18:00 THEFT OF RECYCLABLES

Occurred on Cowell Ln. Subj in Red SUV believed to be removing recyclables between hrs of 7pm and 7am; picked up every other week; next p/u is 08/10/10

Oh no!  The SSRT(aaHB)GC have begun to schedule and coordinate their activities.  The neighborhood will soon be helpless before the scourge of trash picker / cat burglars.  The only way that this can be stopped is for good citizens to swamp the police with reports of trash pickers.  Then they can have like task force or something, with a big map with pins, with different colored pins for different times of day, and pretty soon all the pins will line up in concentric circles around the secret underground recycling theft base, and then they can send in the police dogs, and that’ll be that.

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19:39 SUSPICIOUS PERSON

Officer initiated activity at Sp Depot, Dinkelspiel Station Ln, Atherton.Out with subjs/advised train does not stop. Disposition: Advised.

A person was sitting at a train station on a weekday.  This wouldn’t normally be a suspicious activity.  In Atherton, of course, it is, because the good citizens long ago lobbied Caltrain not to stop at their train station except on weekends, when they might want to use it to quaintly ride up to a quaint baseball game or something.  During the week, it is noisy, and might attract undesirables.

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20:56 FIRE CALL – GENERAL

Occurred at Menlo College, Main Comp on El Camino Real. . Fire alarm/per fire it’s burnt popcorn/ Disposition: Assisted.

Menlo College is one of Atherton’s minor attractions.  It bills itself as “Silicon Valley’s Business School” and offers a reasonably-priced education that (hopefully) feeds graduates directly into management positions with prestigious local companies.  Menlo is pretty anxious to reassure interested parties that it is a real college with real college stuff, like accreditation and women’s wrestling and everything.  It could skip most of that rigamarole, though, and just post this police report, since the essential difference between college campuses and other places is the presence of frequent popcorn-induced fire alarms.