In Defense of Boxology: Why Modularity Drives Innovation

Well, it's a form of conventional human wisdom.

Critics often argue that modern AI research is becoming overly boxed-in—too reliant on modular frameworks, pipelines, and pre-baked components. They call this "boxology," implying it’s an uncreative or even reductive approach. But what if boxology isn't a symptom of stagnation, but a sign of progress?

To answer this, we must examine the broader history of technology, where the recurring theme is not the rejection of complexity, but the mastery of it through abstraction, encapsulation and modularization—what some deride as “boxology”. From shipping containers to software engineering, human progress has always involved drawing boxes—then connecting them better.

What Is Boxology?

Boxology refers to the practice of simplifying complex systems into modular components—“boxes”—that interact with one another via clearly defined interfaces. In AI, this might look like a high-level architecture diagram filled with specific neural network modules. Critics argue that this focus on componentization reduces AI research to assembling pre-built parts, stifling novel approaches.

But is that a fair critique? Or are we overlooking the historical pattern of how technological revolutions emerge?

Containerization: The Logistics Revolution That Changed the World

Before the 1950s, global shipping was an expensive, labor-intensive nightmare. Every item—whether it was a car engine or a crate of bananas—had to be manually loaded, secured, and unloaded. Then an introduction of standardized shipping containers, pioneered by Malcolm McLean, an American trucking entrepreneur who popularized the intermodal shipping containes, transformed the industry.

It was a simple idea: standardize the size of cargo containers so they could be easily stacked, stored, and transferred between ships, trains, and trucks. These containers created a universal interface between ships, trains, and trucks. This modular approach didn’t stifle innovation—it supercharged it. Ports, vehicles, and logistics software were redesigned around this standard. It reduced shipping costs by up to 90% and facilitated the explosion of global trade and supply chain innovation.

Encapsulation in Software Engineering

In software engineering, the principle of encapsulation underpins modern software development. Object-oriented programming (OOP), introduced in the 1960s and 70s, allowed developers to build systems as collections of interacting objects, each encapsulating its internal state and exposing only what was necessary. The abstraction barrier became a powerful tool for managing complexity.

Consider how modern systems are built today: microservices, RESTful APIs, and container orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes all reflect a boxological mindset. They allow developers to reason about parts of a system in isolation, to mix and match components, and to evolve architectures incrementally.

Far from impeding progress, this mindset has catalyzed it. The explosion of open-source ecosystems and cloud-native computing would be unthinkable without these abstractions.

Boxology in AI research: a Necessary Phase

In the development of deep learning related algorithms, boxology takes the form of modular pipelines, layered neural networks, and conceptual frameworks like encoder-decoder architectures. Critics say this encourages plug-and-play thinking at the expense of deep understanding. Yet this structure enables reproducibility, collaboration, and scalability. More importantly, it fosters ecosystem development.

Modern machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face Transformers abstract away low-level details, enabling researchers and engineers to focus on higher-order problems. The Transformer architecture, for instance, is essentially a well-defined set of components (attention layers, normalization, feed-forward layers) that can be rearranged, extended, or swapped. This is the industrialization of AI, much like what happened with electricity, automobiles, or software before it.

Creativity Beyond the Box

Boxology isn’t the enemy of innovation—it’s a prerequisite, as an information compression to for us to grasp the explosion of knowledge in all domains. Human progress often moves in a cycle: we explore the chaotic frontier, we identify patterns, we create tools, and then we encapsulate. That encapsulation becomes the platform for the next frontier.

References:

• Levinson, M. (2006). The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton University Press.

• Booch, G., Rumbaugh, J., & Jacobson, I. (2005). The Unified Modeling Language User Guide. Addison-Wesley.

• Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). "Attention is All You Need." In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.